Markus on analogue imaginary: technically timeless.

Or: The golden mean between brush and sensor.

To say it in a quite sober tone: It’s all about technology. Shooting film is more than just one of many ways to picture an object. It is much more a fascinating combination of accuracy, creativity and magic (with which we already leave the path of sobriety).

For me, a digitally taken picture is more a file than a picture, showing naked facts. The opposite of those files is painted or drawn pictures, which are rarely true to life but make it to reach our emotions and detach from the limitations of the present moment.

And then, there’s analogue photography.

Out of my sight the photographic film with its emulsion is a “Chemical Brush”: On the one hand, with shooting an object (in our peaceful way) we are creating a document. But through the play with grain, sharpness, shadows and colours, we are also interpreting it in our own artistic way (which can be imitated but not reached by digital photography).
In addition, the medium film owns the characteristics of durability and tangibility. When I found a bunch of old slides showing the 60s West-Berlin and firstly saw them projected on a wall, I was fascinated how they captured those times in an incredibly vivid way with intense colours and fine grain: it seemed like I got sucked into the sixties. Could you imagine having this time-machine-effect by watching a JPEG-file on a computer screen?

Because of these unique characteristics gathered in film, I decided to shoot pictures of the everyday life in Berlin analogue: the people I show should be recognizable as the persons that they actually are, but embedded in the flattering grain and the shining colours of film they get raised to timeless characters symbolizing the feeling of living in this fascinating city (or at least I hope they do).

Berlin is a town that always has been reinventing and renewing itself and just right now it is changing its face nearly every year or even month. A city like this one should be immortalized on a medium which is resistant to the changes of times.

And at the same time — if you think about it — the city of Berlin and shooting analogue is quite similar: It has a big history and is quite vintage, it is quite hyped these days (especially by hipsters), but most of all: it is timeless.

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By Markus Henseler
aka @light_meter