[ART]_CONnected

1/27/2016

International Holocaust Remembrance Day*

LEST WE FORGET

^{"Es fangt genauso an", sagt der alte Franz,}

^{"es is das gleiche Lied, es is derselbe Tanz.}

^{Es fangt genauso an, wie vor sechzig Jahr'}

^{Und es war'n damals auch am Anfang nur a paar."**}

71 years ago, on January 27, 1945, soldiers of the Soviet First Ukrainian Front fought their way to the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They found just under 6,000 prisoners still alive in the camp...

Auschwitz was the paradigm for the Nazi concentration camps. The estimated number (based on German data) of people killed in Auschwitz is about 1.5 million, including 1.35 million Jews and 90,000 Poles.

Some years ago, in 2008, I went (by train) to Auschwitz. I had only a small digital camera with me. But I was (mentaly) not able to take many pictures anyway. To many ghosts of the past...

Annihilated...

* The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 2 million Roma, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005.

** The chorus of a song by the Austrian group STS from 1992. The song is from a time when in Germany (and Austria) homes for asylum seekers where burned down. Something what is happening now again...

Roughly translated:

"It begins just as back then," says the old Franz,

^{„it is the same song, it is the same dance.}

^{It begins exactly as sixty years ago '}

^{And then at the beginning there where also only a few. "}

1/21/2016

ICONS

One can still find them everywhere in Russia: Statues and busts of Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin, the man whose ideas formed a whole century. Today is the 92th anniversary of his death.

1/13/2016

A WALK IN THE PARK

Vienna, Schoenbrunn Palace Park

Into the Maze

Shelter

Growing

1/08/2016

REDISCOVERED II

Finally it was snowing...

Landscape, Untitled #4

Landscape (detail), Untitled #5

Landscape, Untitled #6

1/02/2016

REDISCOVERED

On the first day of the new year I somehow rediscovered how much fun landscape photography could be...

Landscape, Untitled #1

Landscape, Untitled #2

Landscape, Untitled #3

1/01/2016

HALLO, GOOD BYE

2015 - The Last Sunset of the Year

So it's a new year. As usually no New Year's resolutions from my side. Just hoping to make some pictures about which somebody feel the same like one visitor of my exhibition in Bagni di Lucca this summer, who wrote in the guestbook:

Il messaggio di ogni opera arrivo direttamente agli occhi al cuore.
[The message of the work is going directly from the eyes to the heart]

If I could achieve this with some of my pictures this year too I already would be very glad...

Happy New Year to everybody.

12/23/2015

Work in Progress

PROJECT "FRONTLINE"

A few weeks ago I started with my new project called "Frontline". The background of this project is the WW2 Battle of Moscow, which took place (according to official history) from Sept. 30, 1941 to April 2, 1942. Today it is seen as the largest battle between two armies of all time. Combining the totals for both sides, German an Soviet, approximately seven million troops were involved in some portion of this battle. Of this seven millions, 2.5 millions were killed, taken prisoners, missing or wounded bad enough to require hospitalization, 1.9 millions of them on the Soviet side. At some points the German Army reached the outskirts of Moscow but was stopped about 25 km from the Kremlin, today a car drive of about 20 minutes (if there is no traffic). The Battle of Moscow marked the first time Hitler's armies failed to triumph with their Blitzkrieg tactics and the German army never completly recovered from that defeat which is seen by many contemporary historians as the ultimate turning point of WW2.

Along the frontline of this battle there are today a lot of memorials and monuments remembering the heroic fight of the Red Army to stop the Fasiscts. With my project I want to document some of them. Seeing photography as a meaning of expression of one's feelings I am planing to "manipulate" my pictures in a way that they express the emotions I had while making the pictures. Here are first test to try out how to achieve this...