abstract
abstract © Verena Fischer 2012
I better won’t dwell on this last year of 2012, since it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I think it’s only natural to be disappointed when looking back. Therefore I’ll skip this part for now and focus on looking forward to a better 2013 instead. I’ll end the year with a similarly nondescript abstract that caught my eye at the cinema the other day.
By the way, after a bit of a break for health reasons, I am now up for new mischief. Time to get back into the game! Let’s enjoy another year of photography together, this time hopefully without such long breaks. In fact I’m planning another 365 days of daily photography, because it is still the most enjoyable and rewarding way of engaging with photography in my opinion.
day 277: abstract waves
abstract waves © Verena Fischer 2012
I was looking at my records from a certain angle and suddenly realised that the reflection of the light makes them almost look like waves and ripples on a calm lake. I think I kind of managed to capture this strange perception.
day 248: abstract composition
abstract composition © Verena Fischer 2012
This picture probably shows two things: First of all, if you’re uninspired, put the camera away and do something else. You haven’t seen the original picture before editing the crap out of it, so you just have to trust me that it’s appallingly bad. Whatever I was trying to capture, it didn’t work at all. The second thing the picture shows is that even with a bad bad bad original picture you can maybe still get a strange abstract out of it. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
day 244: abstract round
abstract round © Verena Fischer 2012
It’s late at night. I need a picture quick. That’s probably what went through my head when I took this picture. Well, some days you have inspiration, some days you don’t and as abstracts go this one isn’t so bad.
day 232: abstract stripes
abstract stripes © Verena Fischer 2012
This is a picture that would have been impossible without my 50mm 1.4/f lens and I really pushed the shutter speed as well. It was basically taken in complete darkness with just the light falling in through the blinds, without a tripod. Sometimes you really gotta push the limits of your tools. I think it created a sort of eerie look.
day 231: abstract in white and blue
abstract in white and blue © Verena Fischer 2012
As seen on a train from Berlin to Leipzig.
day 227: abstract red
abstract red © Verena Fischer 2012
This abstract red shape is the last thing I see before falling asleep. It comes about through the red light from the distribution socket right next to the bed shining onto an IKEA lamp. One day I just had to attempt to capture it. I’m actually surprised that it worked so well, since it was very dark.
day 200: red
red © Verena Fischer 2012
This was not the only picture I took for that day, but somehow I really liked the texture and the colour. It’s almost like an abstract painting.
day 150: metallic
metallic © Verena Fischer 2012
| Canon EOS 450D | 50.0 mm | ISO 800 | f/1.4 | 1/100 sec |
I’ve been busy with work this week, since I have a deadline soon and only now I finally found some time to have a look at the pictures I’ve been taking the last few days. This one certainly falls in the category “almost black and white” again and I was rather undecided whether I should go with this abstract or with a self-portrait. In the end I decided that I’ve been necessarily focusing on myself too much these last few days, since I’m writing a PhD application right now. Trying to portray yourself in the right light necessarily turns the spotlights inside and that can be a bit much sometimes. Yes, abstract is the way to go before I drive myself mad with all the self-portraying.
day 140: abstract street art
abstract street art © Verena Fischer
These markings on the street are like the politics that have us all entangled. On first sight it seems to make sense, but then after a while you get lost and start wondering what it all means. Politics, society, “common sense”. Maybe it feels like rope around your neck that is suffocating you slowly. Or maybe that rope is a mere imagination, which you invent whenever you feel as if you are in a situation that is beyond your control. In any case, in the end you want to escape, like any cornered animal. Let me tell you though … there is no escape from it all. Running off into the forest won’t help. Believe me, you will come crawling back and if it is only to rummage through the city bins. In the end you will be like the guy in Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep. Nobody will understand what you were trying to achieve, but everyone will know that you have failed.
day 127: abstract view
abstract view © Verena Fischer 2011
Another picture that I took late at night after a day of trying to sort out things around the house. It shows the view from our bedroom window through the curtains. I like the patterns they create on the walls when the streetlights shine in. I remember many situations where I looked at patterns like those at night and strangely enough felt as if it was part of feeling at home. We could get thicker curtains, but I think I prefer it like this.
day 66: playing games
playing games © Verena Fischer 2011
Maybe you have noticed that I’m a little behind on my posting schedule. Taking pictures and writing a post each day can be a bit much, especially when my mind is on other things. The last few days I had my mind on the future and on many of the questions that I’ve been asking myself over and over for the last few years. The main question is about happiness and what it needs to reach it.
Some people live in the past and try to justify their behaviour with the things that happened to them. They dwell on it, sometimes they also dwell on their own mistakes and they obsess on things they could have said or done better. They want to exactly locate who is to blame or what decision brought them onto the wrong path. Unhappy people often live in the past, because their present doesn’t have much to offer. They live not only in the past, but also in the “what if”. They think they would be happier if they had chosen differently or if certain things hadn’t happened. The grass on the other side is always greener.
Other people live in the future, always setting goals and sacrificing the present to reach them. You meet many of them at universities, passing their days and nights in libraries and labs, working towards a deadline. After the deadline they fall into a deep hole, because there is often no real satisfaction involved in actually reaching the goals they set themselves. These people are too busy to notice that they’re actually not happy either. They also live in the state of “what if” since they can never be certain that they will reach the goals they aim for. Else these goals probably wouldn’t be worth pursuing in any case.
I have just finished my MSc program and I have to say that I don’t feel much satisfaction about that. I’ve worked hard, sacrificed a lot and in the end it’s very obvious: Reaching goals really doesn’t make you any happier. You just end up wondering what’s next! I guess I knew that before to some extent, but it’s all the clearer now. “What if” just doesn’t cut it anymore. I have to make certain that I actually do what I want to do right now and not in some distant future that can only be reached by a complicated set of causal constraints. I think the key to being happy is neither in the past nor in the future. It’s not in another dimension either. It’s right now in the present.
day 60: abstract technology
abstract technology © Verena Fischer 2011
Yesterday it was again raining so it was time for one of my bad weather close-ups. This time I took a picture of Ezequiel’s beautiful red headphones. One day I have to try them out to see whether they’re more than just pretty.
The bad weather is actually getting on my nerves by now and I can’t wait to get to a warmer climate again. Maybe living in Berlin is not such a good idea after all considering that I have such delicate health in cold weather. Berlin is actually one of the coldest places in Germany in winter. However, I have always liked Berlin and the opportunities here seem endless. Nice relatively cheap flats, museums, English language cinema, lots of shops, areas with interesting things to see, second hand bookshops, cafés, lots of tango, many universities with groups of related interest. Really, I like it a lot and the longer I live here, the more I seem to like it.
I’ve even noticed today that I’ve come to feel a little bit at home here, which is rather surprising since I’ve longed to develop that same feeling in Brighton for years and never managed to come anywhere near it. The closest I got was this feeling of familiarity. It probably had to do with the fact that I never could arrange myself with the relatively low living standard unless you had a very well-paying job. In Germany even unemployed people don’t have to share their flats. In comparison in England I often saw people in good jobs sharing with one or two people, because it was just so ridiculously expensive. And people there don’t even seem to complain or question their circumstances. Keep calm and carry on, because that’s all you can ever expect. I never understood it! This mentality of just accepting things as they are was probably another part of my feeling always a bit out of place.
However, don’t let me ramble on about England. After all I don’t live there anymore and I’m certain that I will not go back, no matter if they offer me the best job in the world (which they won’t anyway). I actually see my future here in Berlin, especially since I’m starting to feel at home. Maybe we will need a winter residence somewhere warm though. Do you guys have any ideas where it would be nice and warm?
day 55: underground movement
underground movement © Verena Fischer 2011
Yesterday was filled with interesting but headache provoking conversations since we went to the Freie Universität. It was a bit of a strange experience since the university is in Dahlem which doesn’t look like Berlin at all. It’s very suburban and partly also reminded me of the area of the Düsseldorf university. On the way to the building where we were supposed to be we saw a couple of university buildings already, but they were just old residential style houses. I found that a bit weird actually and imagined the whole university to be spread out in these small residential houses. However, our destination looked more like a university building though. Brown metal, probably from the 70s or 80s, a little bit rusty. The colour reminded me a bit of the Landesarchiv in Düsseldorf which was close to where I used to live.
The Landesarchiv made me gasp when I first saw it. It was built in 1976 and it’s one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen, massive, of a brown colour with rust all over. It looks like a dark tower of evil (I didn’t take the picture, google was my friend). I sometimes imagined having to work there to make my own workplace seem less daunting. The desperation of the people forced to walk into this tower of evil every morning must be soul crushing.
The university building I’m telling you about is nothing like it though apart from the colour. It’s a sort of flat building with only 2 or 3 floors, but it’s spread out with long corridors and it seems vast like a city. The corridors were inviting and of a light colour. The only thing I didn’t find so pleasant was the smell of it. It smells of German university. I assume that it must be the cleaning products and the same type of grey recycling paper combined with cheap disinfectant soap that produces this smell.
I remember one summer at the university of Düsseldorf wondering whether I’m poisoning myself by drinking the water at the university. The taps with drinking water were marked, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they put some chemicals in it that gave it such a rotten taste. However, I think it was just the smell of the whole place that made the water taste weird. A taste of wet recycling paper.
Yesterday’s picture was taken at the subway station Spichernstraße. It almost has an abstract quality to it, although it’s just one of the yellow subway trains typical for Berlin. It was moving in when I took the picture.
day 48: still not loving police
still not loving police © Verena Fischer 2011
Yesterday Ezequiel wanted to go to a bookshop. He already ordered some books on amazon, but you know … it’s his addiction, he just likes books. And I like that he likes books, so I’m not objecting, although I actually have started to feel threatened in bookshops over the last few years. You just go in there and you feel the pressure of all the books screaming at you “Read me, read me”! I just start to feel stressed in bookshops now, because it’s all too clear that there is not enough time in a life to read all the good books in the world. What can you do? That’s just how it is.
We went to Kreuzberg where there is an English language bookshop. I’ve only been to Kreuzberg for tango before so I was pretty surprised when I realised that it’s actually a really nice area. Maybe a little too hip if you look too closely, but definitely nice. There is even an entire bookshop just dedicated to SciFi and Fantasy, I certainly find that appealing! In the same street there is also a crime bookshop too. Well, both indicators that it’s indeed too trendy around there … which is also reflected by the street art everywhere.
The English language bookshop is in Riemannstraße and it’s full of used books. Most of them are not exactly in good quality and the basement is full of shit science fiction. The person who seemed to be the owner of the shop was shuffling about in not so good health in between playing strategy games on the computer. Although she/he (a definite indefinite case) was helpful it was also obvious that she/he was not entirely bent on selling anything. Most books had a red mark in them saying “lending only” which stopped me from even considering them. After having a good look around we actually went out without buying anything shrugging a bit about the experience.
And yesterday’s picture can also give you an idea of what the street art in the area is like. It made me chuckle a bit, because it’s sort of provocative and not, both at the same time. Love is such a strong word after all.
day 42: rust and shadows
rust and shadows © Verena Fischer 2011
With yesterday’s picture I feel like I’m coming back to an old love of mine: Rusty details of old machines in abandoned buildings were my favourite subjects about 6 years ago. Walking around in abandoned buildings is always a little creepy and depending on how well you know the area you shouldn’t do it alone. I sometimes did, just for kicks, but I’m also a person who walks through dark parks at 4am on my own.
Once, about 10 years ago I was walking through the Stadtpark in my hometown at 4am in the middle of winter. I was walking home from a party in my favourite club at the time. I sometimes did that when I was feeling a bit blue or if the night was exceptionally beautiful. My hometown is Chemnitz, the former Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany, and it’s one of the 3 big cities in the state of Saxony. It’s a bit of a working class town and it’s not exactly my most favourite place in the world. I would rather have a giant slug eat my brain than to live there ever again, just to give you an appropriate picture of my actual feelings towards this place.
However, 10 years ago I was still living Chemnitz and I used to go to a club on Friday nights. From there I was walking home that night and I was angry and a bit depressed I remember. There was a thick layer of snow and the footpath was crusty with frozen snow and ice. It takes about 1 1/2 hours to walk from the city centre to where we used to live back then and about halfway there I started to get the feeling that I was being followed. I ignored the feeling since I assumed that It was just the normal paranoia of walking alone through a park that was covered with a layer of snow that swallows all noises. Well, that was until I heard the ice behind me cracking. I’m not heavy, so I could just walk over the layer of ice almost without it making a sound, it must have been something or someone heavier than me. Maybe a tall man. The only animal that could have been heavy enough for that noise was a wild boar, so I would have been in trouble in any case, although I don’t think wild boars ever come to that park.
For a moment I wondered whether I should stop and turn around, but then I thought that it would feel like that silly moment in horror films where the protagonist hears an odd noise in the basement and goes downstairs to check. I consider myself more intelligent than that! Instead I just carried on walking without even changing my pace. I only heard the cracking noise once more about 10 minutes later, but this time further away, almost completely muffled by the snow. I looked back then, but I could see only the glow of the snow and the dark trees looming over me. In retrospect the cracking of the ice was probably just due to the temperature changing closer towards the morning hours. After all, who in their right mind would go into a dark park at 4 am in the dead of winter?
day 36: distortion
distortion © Verena Fischer 2011
I think all the stress and sleepless nights of the last weeks and months are finally catching up with me. I’ve spent most of yesterday on my sofa, watching things, reading and relaxing. It made me realise how exhausted I really am. I’m glad that I can take some time off now and just take it easy for a while. Originally I wanted to go to tango last night, but then I felt that I couldn’t face cycling all the way there and back and dancing and dealing with people. I just wanted to stay on the sofa and stare blankly at a movie or series I’ve seen so many times that I don’t need my brain at all. Sometimes that’s necessary.
Overall I’ve probably overused my brain in the last few months, since I feel like mostly watching silly movies. At least I’ve found some mind-space to read some nice books. I just finished The Innocent by Ian McEwan and Letter to D by André Gorz. Although the former was slightly predictable in the plot the actual way of putting things in the end was just crazy. One chapter I read with the horrible feeling of not wanting to hear any of it, but then it was too gripping to not read it. It reminded me of reading Stephen King books where you’re torn between the horror of it all and the absolute necessity to carry on reading.
Letter to D is a short nice book, a declaration of love from Gorz to his terminally ill wife. Shortly after the book was published they committed suicide together because they could not imagine living without each other. Parts of the book make more sense if you know a thing or two about the intellectual history of France in the last century, but the main message is perfectly understandable without knowing any of the names mentioned. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it warmly.
“You’ve given me all of your life and all of you; I’d like to be able to give you all of me in the time we have left.” (André Gorz in Letter to D)
The Innocent however depends more on your personal preferences. If you don’t like to be confronted with the terrible abyss in which humans can pull you sometimes, then I recommend not to read it. However, if you don’t mind being surprised in the most awful way, then it’s worth picking up a copy, because it is exceptionally well written in my opinion.
“The imagination was even more brutal than life.” (Ian McEwan in The Innocent)
Yesterday’s picture is of a part of a postcard that I bought at the Bauhaus archive here in Berlin. I was playing with my macro converter and since I couldn’t quite get my idea to work I ended up with my two converters just lying on the postcard in weird angles. I quite like the outcome of this little experiment.
experiments in experience 