People Section Updated

I have updated the whole Peoples section, bringing the layout in line with the other sections and hopefully making navigation easier.
At the same time, I updated a few sets, notably 

- Up Close & Personal (2010-2013)
- Passengers
- Faces of India

and added a new one, People in Polaroids

Enjoy...

8 Exposures....

Impossible Project, the company that produces the new Polaroid instant film, has published an interview with me on their web site. Here is the link: http://blog.the-impossible-project.com/8-exposureswith-ghee-dondlinger

With many thanks again to the great Impossible Project team, not just for making the films (of course) but also for promoting the instant film community in such an active and supporting way. 

India Revisited

If you'd ask me what my favourite country for visiting was, I'd say without hesitation, India. I've been fortunate enough to visit the country eight times in the recent years, initially for work but recent trips being for leisure.

Now India is one of those places where visitors come away either loving it or hating it. It is a place of extremes. It is rich in history and in culture, reflected in the temples and palaces but also in the mores and beliefs that mark everyday life. On the other hand, especially in large cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, the squalor and the misery are omnipresent - as are ostentatious displays of wealth. And obviously India has recently been making mostly negative headlines around the world. But defining India by its social and economic problems is doing it as much injustice as defining it by its palaces and temples. India to me has always been about its people - the openness, the generosity and the ease with which Indian welcome strangers in their midst. From each and every trip there, I came back with great experiences and new friendships. 

My recent trip to India, from Christmas 2012 to mid-January 2013, included a few firsts. One was that this was my first trip to Northern India, specifically to the Sate of Rajasthan. It was also the first time that I was travelling alone - although that is a very relative term: you're never really alone in India. Every day I found myself in good company, and I came back with experiences I would never have made hadn't I been on the road by myself. Despite earlier plans to tour around, I ended up spending a good deal of time in the city of Udaipur, which turned out to be a good decision. By spending more time in one place, I ended up not just meeting people but also spending time with them, and certainly the highlight of this trip were various motorbike trips around the city and the surrounding mountains with friends I had made there. 

Udaipur is not that big, and it is a good deal more laid back than the cities I visited previously. It features several lakes, several palaces - the huge City Palace, the Lake Palace on an island (now a luxury hotel), the Monsoon Palace on a hilltop and a few minor ones as well. It is prominently featured in the 1983 James Bond movie, Octopussy.

Winter is the main tourist season in Rajasthan as the climate is really agreeable that time of year, but for all that, I was surprised not to see that many tourists around the city - I guess most spend their time being driven around in air conditioned cars and buses. The most visible tourists were the backpackers, but if you stayed away from the places mentioned in the Lonely Planet guidebook, it was easy to avoid them as well. When I visited a graveyard where the local Maharajas (kings) have been buried over the centuries, I found the place to be deserted. When I asked the rickshaw driver, he simply said, 'Yes, empty. It's not in Lonely Planet, na.' 

I said earlier that for me, India is about its people. When I now think back on the trip, the most vivid memories are not the tourist highlights - splendid as they were - but the encounters I made, and the friendships that remain.

This was also the first India trip where I took a Polaroid camera with me. Unfortunately I had chosen to take a 600 camera with PX 680 film, which turned out to be a problem, as it reacted badly to the multiple x-raying at the airports - many of the colour prints ended up having a red discolouring. A fair number turned out alright though, and fortunately I also had some black and white films with me. 

In the photos which I uploaded, you will find a good number of people shots - Indians are not shy about being photographed, or for that matter, photographing others; and I made a deal with the people I photographed in that I shot one photo for them and one for me. Unfortunately 'though, the best photo I possibly took on the tour didn't stay with me for long: after having photographed an old priest in the Jain temple in Ranakpur, the gentleman grabbed the photo and ran off before I had a chance to shoot another one. I later saw him proudly showing the picture around. I guess he was happy with the result. 

Beside using the Polaroid camera, I also shot a number of films with a Holga camera. Unfortunately, here too, disaster struck as a malfunctioning camera causing blurred results. Only a handful of pics turned out ok. Because the Polaroid films were damaged, I shot more photos than I normally would have on the iPhone, mostly using the Hipstamatic app. I also put together a selection of those images. 

Here then are the links:

• Rajasthan Analogue (Polaroid and Holga)
• Rajasthan Digital
• Mumbai 2013
• Photos from previous India trips can be found on the India Travelogue page

India Polaroids

I recently returned from a three week trip to India. I spent half of this vacation visting friends in Mumbai, and the other half hanging out and doing some sightseeing in and around Udaipur, which is located in Rajhastan, in Northern India.

For now I have scanned and posted the Polaroids which I took in those two cities. I will write up a more detailed account of the trip - and of my impressions of India - in the near future. For now here is the link to the India Polaroids. 

More text and more photos to follow.  

Another Time: Berlin in Black & White Polaroids

I think I wrote about this already in an earlier post: I believe that today's Polaroid photography has two distinct faces - colour and black & white. Colour polaroids, especially Impossible Project's new Color Protection film, are vibrant, and for me very much 'today' (to avoid the term 'modern'), and personally I do not associate them with the images from the 60s or 70s, the heyday of colour polaroid photography.

But for black and white polaroids, I find this to be different. The 'Silver Shade' film stock produces results which to me are very much reminiscent of old photographs; thanks mostly to the light leaks and the other imperfections, and the sepia sheen that the photos take on if not stored in a dry place for a while shortly after being taken. David Sylvian, in the liner notes to the catalogue for his Impossible Project exhibition, Glowing Enigmas, called this "the look of something long lost, redeemed from memory, another time and place." 

Thus when I decided on a project involving black and white film (i.e. Impossible Project's Silver Shade films), I figured that combining images of Berlin's historic buildings (and other old landmarks) with the vintage look and feel of the Silver Shade films made perfect sense. So over these past two, mostly cold and grey, months, I was out with the Polaroid cameras, capturing not only the better known historic landmarks in the center of Berlin, but also a number of older industrial buildings throughout the city. As always, there are some exceptions to the rule - so not every building I captured in the series is old or historic.  The industrial buildings by the way I found fascinating enough to want to devote a whole series to them in the near-ish future.

So here it is then, the outcome of my latest project, aptly named "Another Time: Berlin in Black & White". Enjoy. And let me know what you think.

More of my polaroid work can be found [here] and on [flickr]. 

Read my earlier post about David Sylvian's recent polaroid work [here].

City Polaroids: Berlin, Part 2

 In September I published several sets of polaroid photos which I had taken over the summer, mostly in Berlin but also in Budapest and the South of France. As summer turned to autumn, I kept shooting polaroids, fretting a bit that the results may end up being inferior once less-than-perfect daylight conditions set in. As it turned out, both the cameras and the films continued to perform really well, and I ended up with another satisfying selection of pictures.

I published one set earlier, featuring mostly the autumnal colours that nature puts on display at that time of year. This week-end I uploaded another set in the "City Polaroids" series. These images were all taken between October and November in Berlin. As in the earlier sets, I mixed details i.e. fragments of urban life with shots of buildings (see also my comments in the related blog entry here). 

Now, compared to the sets published this summer, there are two major differences. One, of course, is the changing season: the bright colours of summer giving way gradually to the muted shades, or even non-colours, of autumn. At the same time, Impossible Project, the makers of the polaroid films, came out with a new formula, the Color Protection film. This new film stock manages to render colours a lot more life-like than the previous iterations. At first I used the PX 70 film (as I shoot mostly with SX-70 cameras), but then began using the PX 680 film together with an ND filter, and this is the solution that I eventually stuck with. The PX 680 film's results are a shade darker than the PX 70, and the colours a bit more on the cold side. Also, they are more saturated and there were fewer irregularities. So if I were to recommend one film, it would be this PX 680 Color Protection.

Enough said, here are the links:

• City Polaroids: Berlin (2) - Autumn Colours
• City Polaroids: Berlin (1) - Summer Colours
• Polaroid page

Autumn Polaroids

"Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence"

Yoko Ono - Seasons of Glass

Now that the weather is turning (for the worse), and the last of the leaves are dropping from the trees, it's time to kiss autumn good-bye. Time also to put together the photos from this year's autumn photo outings, which, predictably, I did using Polaroid cameras this time around. So here it is then, a brand new collection of polaroids taken around parks and cemeteries in Berlin: Autumn Polaroids.

I used a variety of Impossible Project films when taking the pictures, which explains the different colour shades that can be noticed when browsing through the set: the new PX 70 Color Protection, which provides the more natural looking, warmer colours; the PX 680 Color Protection with also natural looking but less saturated colors, and the older PX 70 Color Shade Cool film with its trademark slight yellow tinge.


More links:

• Polaroid micro site
• Polaroid Summer