On the road with the half frame camera FED Mikron 2: The Kodacolor Diary May 2019 - February 2020

By Rainer Strzolka

The coldness of digital photography created in me an increasing unwillingness to surrender artistically to the dictates of zeros and ones.
The result is not an attitude of refusal against digital techniques, but an indifference according to the principle "What's it to me."
I don't despise digital photography. I ignore it, knowing full well that by doing so I am bucking the trend of the times to go along with every so-called advance. Just because something is new doesn't mean it's better than what came before. The constant adaptation to politically and economically desired innovations has meanwhile taken on a compulsive character, which is probably appropriate to the dictates of the consumer world. But not to a life worth living for people.
I have never liked dictates, not even in school, because they offered the foretaste of dictatorship. When my teacher Vera M?ller announced a dictation, her expression became sickeningly stern.

There are few lyrics that have given this attitude to life such a fitting expression as the Berlin band "Gro stadtgefl?ster", where one of their songs says:
I don't have to do anything except sleep, eat, drink, breathe and fuck.
And tick according to my self-written rules

One result of this attitude for me is to work with unusual materials and films, in this case the FED Mikron 2, a half-format camera built almost unchanged from 1968 to 1985, and expired Kodak film stock.
The charm of these images lies in their imperfection, an almost wonderful detachment from the cold world of the present.
Welcome to the world of blur.
The present volume contains photographs from Witzenhausen an der Werra and a few from Hannover and the nearby Rethen. They show the quite obviously possible proximity of militaria and wine.

This catalog perpetuates an analogous exhibition that was shown at Hof Carlsen in Nordfriesland on September 3, 2022. All pictures shown here were given away to the visitors after exactly one day of presentation.

It worked for you:
Camera: FED Mikron 2, year 1970
Editor: Martina Hellmich
Film: Kodacolor 200, expired 1993
Photography: Rainer Strzolka, born 1956
Photo lab: Foto Weckbrodt, Hannover
Thanks to: Annette Schr?der

Please also visit us on the Internet at
www.galerie-fuer-kulturkommunikation.de

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BF35LHQ1
• ISBN13: 9798352454831
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 34 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.5" x 11.0"