Photography | Fotoeins Fotografie

Posts from the ‘Photography’ category

My Berlin: the buried Bibliothek at Bebelplatz

On a clear cool late-autumn morning, a young child is looking through an opening in the cobblestone plaza. She looks up to the man standing next to her.

“Daddy, why is there a glass window? What happened here?”

The thing to keep in mind is that this square in Berlin is called Bebelplatz (BAY-buhl-platz), and not Babbleplatz. It’s easy to make the mistake. After all, a great repository of books was once created inside the building seen above, in what was once home of the Königliche Bibliothek or Royal Library.

But then came along a large racist blather.

Accompanied by a big ugly fire.

( Click here for images and more )

Berlin Wannsee cemetery: Helmholtz, Fischer, Conrad

Above/featured: Friedhof Wannsee Lindenstrasse with Andreaskirche in the background.

I came here looking for a physicist, but I also found a Nobel-Prize winning chemist and a successful banker.

In the southwest corner of metropolitan Berlin tucked away under rows of leafy trees in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Wannsee is a small cemetery, next to a tall red brick church Andreaskirche. With the main (east) entrance off Lindenstrasse, the cemetery is called Friedhof Wannsee Lindenstrasse; alternate names include “Neuer Friedhof Wannsee” and “Friedhof Wannsee II.” Opened in 1887, the cemetery is one of the smallest in the city with an area about 1.9 hectares (19-thousand square metres) or a shade under 5 acres.

(My day trip to Wannsee was one element of my “quick” 11-day hop to Berlin in autumn 2021.)

( Click here for more )

Comet Neowise, C/2020 F3, comet, noctilucent clouds, Solar System, night sky, SFU, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

Low light levels, mid-grade attempts

Above/featured: Comet Neowise (C2020/F3), from Burnaby Mountain, BC – 16 Jul 2020 (UTC); more details below.

One of my first lessons in photography was: covet as much natural light as possible. I’m the first to admit I’ll chase that light very hard, especially during winter conditions when days are often grey, dull, and short. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made to get “that light.”

But diminishing light offers different challenges and opportunities to the variety of ways a person might think about a scene or situation before them. Getting the desired effect might require opening the aperture wide, upping the ISO level, lengthening exposure time, or adding light with an artificial flash. If a person’s journey goes down a “dark” path, what might a combination of internal ability and intuition mixed with external planning and happenstance create?

( Click here for images and more )

My Berlin: Alicja Kwade, bridging art and science

Above/featured: Alicja Kwade exhibition, at the Berlinische Galerie. HL:X70.

In mid-2021, the world slowly climbs out of the worst of the pandemic. Later that autumn, I watch DW Culture’s Arts.21 feature on Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade whose work strikes a personal resonance. I have to go see her work and exhibition in person, but would it even be possible? My answer arrives six weeks later with a quick jump home to Berlin.

All of Kwade’s sculptural pieces in her exhibition, “In Abwesenheit” (In Absence)”, are “self-portraits.” But none of them show her face; the pieces aren’t necessarily simple, nor are they “selfies” characterized by the present vernacular. She is not physically present, and yet, every piece provides the visitor a glimpse into her mindset including questions she raises about the volatility of the human condition and about where we fit within a very large universe.

As former scientist, I love and recognize the influences on her art. She is clearly very interested in mathematics, physics, astrophysics, biology, genetics; but she’d be the first to admit she’d need multiple lives to completely fulfill all of her interests. The deconstruction of “self” into precise scientific elements is another way of expressing those (dreaded) “selfies” or self-portraits. I admire the clever play: it’s the breakdown into those elements that tell us what she is, and it’s the measured synthesis of those elements into the broad strokes of her sculptures that tell us who she is.

We’re all playing this game. Everyday things seem so important. But then you zoom out and realize that you’re standing with another billion [people] on a spinning sphere. With that perspective, you’re reminded to just be glad you’re here at all.

– Alicia Kwade about her rooftop commission at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: Artnet News, 16 April 2019.

( Click here for images and more )

My Berlin: Chinese-Canadian Q.J. Louie at the Commonwealth War Cemetery

Above/featured: Cemetery view facing west, from the shelter building to the Stone of Remembrance, Cross of Sacrifice, and Terrace in the distance (WCL-X70: 14/21mm).

There’s a presence from western Canada buried in eastern Germany.

In Vancouver, Canada, the H.Y. Louie family has long been a part of the Chinese-Canadian community and the overall merchant community. Their current business holdings include the London Drugs chain of stores and the IGA grocery-store chain; both are well recognized throughout greater Vancouver.

One member of the family is resting permanently 8000 kilometres away in Berlin, Germany. An important goal in my return to the German capital city is a visit to the cemetery where a member of the Louie family, Q.J. Louie, is buried. It’s never been a matter of if, but when I return to Berlin.

( Click here for images and more )