Archaic Way of Taking Photos

"Funny, how sometimes life gives you things... You just have to try", said Valerié Jouve, while talking about a camera with math professor and dedicated photographer Peter Hallekalek on the way to the Kiefer Quarry in Fürstenbrunn to visit Andreas Lolis's class on sculpture. How true!

 

After passing by the beautiful scenery with small houses, we arrived to Fürstenbrunn. Students of this class live and work together in the space for the period of a month. They wake up, have coffee, use the flex to shape the stone, make sketches, look up to the mountains, hammer the stone; gather around the grill, have drinks during deep conversations or just chat a little, get drunk, dislike each other or maybe make out...As one of them said the other day: the Quarry is kind of like the art version of the reality show Big Brother  – well, exaggerating of course.

 

Andrea Lolis sculpts marble to create polymeric foam, black plastic bags, or say, a gift as he has been carving today. Because of its looks one expects the material to be really light. The heaviness of marble in contrast creates confusion. For instance, Nina Kerschbaumer couldn't be sure if the leftover plastic nearby is also marble or not.

 

Jouve introduced a camera to the class, which she calls "archaic way of making picture." The camera is so simple: "one optic, one film and a space in between." As the camera allows playing with angles, the perspective and the feeling of the space change incredibly.

 

Here, almost all of us are non-native speakers. Therefore, from time to time we use different words than a native speaker would do, which also, from time to time, leads to poetry. In that manner, I love how Jouve plays with the language. For the photographer "the machine corrects the perspective" and I will "nourish the blog", when I'll get more images from the class.

 

Nourish... Such a nice word...