blogs ONLINE: You have a whole half a year spent in South Africa - what impression did you come home?
Vanhöfen: I've never seen a country that is so open to me and met me, whose nature has impressed so much - but I have also seen no country, which also could be so brutally. The beauty and the horror that was the basic principle of my book.
blogs ONLINE: In your picture book "South Africa's coast is not the South Africa of well-known stereotypes, but still barren landscapes and cities to see.
Vanhöfen: I am a political landscape photographer, and my publisher Nicholas Gelpke wanted the political, cultural, social life after apartheid show. He knew that I always try to create ambiguous images. I want the viewer thus forcing the images not only to consume, but really to read.
FOR PERSONJörn Vanhöfen, 47 years, photographer, was sent to the former and at the Folkwang School of Visual Arts in Leipzig trained. For the illustrated book "South Africa's coast, he traveled a total of six months in the south of the continent. 2500 km wide, he followed the coastline of Namibia via Cape Town and Durban to the border with Mozambique. His photographs of townships, barren coastal villages, wildly romantic creeks and waterfalls show off the well-known South African stereotypes. www.joernvanhoefen.deblogs ONLINE: How has your post-apartheid South Africa revealed?
Vanhöfen: I was very scared how much the apartheid still exists, how high the potential for violence is and how big the cultural and economic differences between black and white are.
blogs ONLINE: You speak of beauty and horror. What were your beautiful experiences?
Vanhöfen: The Wild Coast, south of Durban is the most beautiful spots earth that I ever in my life I have seen. To join the waterfalls to come, I had to walk four days. Always parallel to the coast, the five-meter high waves. Through gorges, long river valleys and on grass steppes landscapes. I also encountered animals on which you do not wish to take - such as Black Mambas.
blogs ONLINE: Come get there than normal even tourists go?
Vanhöfen: Yes, in villages with round huts to stay and is affectionately bekocht. These tours are fantastic by the locals themselves with the help of the EU organized, but hardly anyone also taking part. The tourists prefer to stay on the Garden Route or in Cape Town, because the former Transkei, the home country is considered dangerous.
blogs ONLINE: What were the frightening encounters?
Vanhöfen: In Durban is directly in front of me someone had been killed. I photographed from a bridge down a market, when it was suddenly loud: Because someone was in the middle of the crowd shot. I found that very threatening. Because the people had seen that I photograph, and showed with your fingers at me.
blogs ONLINE: How did you saved?
Vanhöfen: I have yet to bridge the clothes and I changed as quickly as possible disappeared. Otherwise, I was often in situations which could have been menacing, in which I never had fear. I was as white never threatened.
blogs ONLINE: Where have you experienced such a situation?
Vanhöfen: In Khayelitsha township near Cape Town. They made me the kindness of the people against me very impressed. I was there one week and was protected, informed and lovingly treated. For me it was incredible how people who for generations have been enslaved and tortured and finally in power, a positive picture of life without hatred can develop. Actually, they should hate each whites - but they do not. In contrast, in white neighborhoods, where I've photographed, critical distance and skepticism very large.
ONLINE blogs: they show no portraits, people come just isolated to your pictures before - why?
Vanhöfen: I watch from a certain distance. I am not in size, individual and the protagonists choose to represent around for the post-apartheid politics to speak. In journalism, there is consternation these images, want to express the sorrow, do not do it. You are just a metaphor. A woman who cries, says nothing about from misery - she screams. The reality in South Africa is too complex to include them in half a year to be able to understand. That's why I go into the distance and trying to Mehrschichtigkeit in the landscape photography should be spelled out.
blogs ONLINE: Like, for example?
Vanhöfen: If I would like to photograph Township, I wonder: What is important, and what I would like to incorporate elements, such as hoarding, which advertises alcohol, and the marketplace before. Through the many details that transported the picture, then creates the complexity. Landscapes, I would like to be a debate about cultural idiosyncrasies to show why there is a motorway, the store looks like, how is the texture of the clothes?
blogs ONLINE: How do you manage the distance?
Vanhöfen: Even by the choice of my camera - a 6 times 7 Plaubel Makina - and by its slowness, I am forced to distance should be preserved. I can not quickly with their focus. Therefore, I must observe the situation for much longer and much more conscious of my position. My camera position is my position innerlicher - and on distance and diversity programs
blogs ONLINE: Your pictures are greatly reduced in their color, often almost sepia color. Why?
Vanhöfen: I want the viewer to the images appear and not on the superficiality of colors. I wish that there was no value, no ambiguity by color, but that the landscape as a whole is perceived. Many images that we know, are aimed precisely at these colors from over. It has something of effect.
ON THE WUNSCHZETTELNicholas Gelpke (ed.), Joern Vanhöfen, Zora del Buono: "South Africa's coasts." marebuchverlag; 136 pages; 49 Euro.Einfach directly and conveniently in blogs shop blogs ONLINE: Do you have any role models?
Vanhöfen: There is a direction in the American Color of the seventies, which is precisely this reduction has sought: The New Color Photography, whose representatives such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld were. Through them I am in my training has been coined.
blogs ONLINE: How did you get the reduced achieved?
Vanhöfen: I have to be photographed times of the day on which the light was not so bright colors and the not so bright. Also, I use only certain films.
blogs ONLINE: And filter?
Vanhöfen: No, no filter, no wide-angle or telephoto lenses - just normal focal length.
blogs ONLINE: That means getting up early?
Vanhöfen: I am half a year at 4, 4:30 clock up, I then drove one hour, had 5:30 to 7:30 photographed clock. Then I'm back six hours or have car drove under a tree reading a book. Evening 17 to 18 clock again, I have photographed.
blogs ONLINE: Your book comes without animals from Africa - only a stuffed lion is immortalized.
Vanhöfen: On the one hand, I am not an animal photographer. On the other hand you have to in order to see wild animals, to a fenced park go. Why should I take pictures and pretend as if the animals in the wild, when they actually are kaserniert? Ultimately, Wildlife in South Africa just a business. Lions to shoot it cost 20,000 U.S. dollars, ausstopfen 10,000 U.S. dollars. And if it's just a business, then I photograph it so, than what it is, in fact kill.
No comments:
Post a Comment