yerevan (armenia), october ‘13

one of my favorite pictures from my last trip (full album). about half of the armenian population lives in yerevan. another country with huge inequality, and also a huge diaspora. armenians live all over the world. i find it interesting how in some parts of the world, emigration is a very normal part of life, having relatives spread across europe and america. loosing friends because their families moved away. it’s good to for once see the other side of immigration too.

in this picture i especially like the frontal view of the building. there’s no element that leads into the picture. as a result it has almost no depth almost as if it were 2 dimensional, only with various layers. also the silhouette of the building resembles mountain peaks. and then there is this beautiful old crane. i like ;)

trabzon (turkey), october ‘13

i find public transport in developing countries very interesting. it’s somehow often a organized chaos or a chaotic organization. there’s no timetable or clear map. mostly there are busses going along some routes the whole day, so you just need to know which direction you need to go, often not an easy task. another phenomenom is that there seems to be a pressure for everyone to drive the same bus models. in kenya it was the toyota something (photo). in trabzon as well: the most of these smaller white minibusses are the same model. however, in the inside some of these busses look spectacular, decorated with fancy lights, pimped up with a loud speaker system. this is probably strongly depending on the bus owners “gusto”.

tabatskuri (georgia), october ‘13

see that camel ad in cyrillic painted on the wall? a pure symbol of a culture clash in a very small village far away from the main infrastructure (map). i wonder how old this is. i’d guess after the fall of the soviet union because i wouldn’t think you could buy camel cigarettes in the soviet union, at least not publicly. But also not too long after the fall, because georgia has its own alphabet and i don’t know why they used cyrillic. you can find more of my travel photos here.

between batumi and tbilissi (georgia), october ‘13

that moment when you realize that you’re totally alone in a foreign country, in a bus where nobody speaks your language and suddenly this song is played in the radio. it made me think: about globalization, global values and differences between cultures. also about the power of music. a truly memorable moment to me, that stands for travelling as i see at its core (full album).

basel, july ‘13

tuesday evening i was fed up with sitting around so at 9 p.m. i decided to do something. i took my bike, cycled out of the city and hiked up a small hill at muttenz. i played around with long exposures and tried a lot of different things. this photo here is the actual very last shot of the session. when i climbed down i had to search my bike for about 15 mins because i didnt know anymore where exactly i put it. i should do this kind of stuff more often.

basel, june ‘13

probably the ugliest face of a building in basel but when reflecting dusk nevertheless pretty nice.

basel, may ‘13

i recently moved to basel, living at the back of this street corner.

beijing, july ‘11

i set my screensaver to my china-photo-folder, so everytime when not touching my computer for 2 minutes, the pictures from china come up on my screen. and every now and then some pictures stand out of all the rest. this one is one of these photographs. i think it generally resembles “my style” (f.e. compare it to the old woman in budapest). not too many elements, but a lot of free space. and when you start connecting the few elements in the picture here you might associate them to a battle old vs new, tradition vs progression, maybe youth vs age in general. i especially like the young girl walking through the picture totally focused, not paying attention to anything around her, with the headphones plugged in, in contrast to the environment, where you see quite a modern building that tries to imitate the traditional style.

kunming (china), august ‘11

i had a lot of trouble with this picture, i took last summer on my trip to china. to me it’s obvious that there’s some kind of a class-warfare. the poor vs. the rich. the kid aiming for the luxurious car, while the poor in the front bent over. but this is just too simple. it’s somewhat boring and too obvious. what makes this picture interesting to me, are the different layers. you have kind of a front-layer with the poor man, then, when you go deeper, the kid sticked on the windows, while the window is also a reflecting surface, as a mirror (if you have a close look, you might also discover myself). and there’s again deeper the showroom. so this opens up a huge new space for interpretation, i didnt see at first. art is not defined through the object itsself. you cannot classify one object as art and another not. art, as i see it, is a way of looking at things. since marcel duchamp’s fountain (and later beuys etc.) everything and everybody can perceived as art or an artist, it depends on the way you look at it!

urbanscapes, beijing, july ‘11

finally, i selected some pictures made on my china trip this summer and put them in a fb-album. they’re all about cities, urbanization, landscapes. maybe there’s also some “nature vs civilisation” battle in it. if you’re interested in that topic, have a look a this presentation by a chinese landscape architecture.