Hamburg Winter 2009/2010

All images presented in this little pictorial and some more can be found in the gallery.

Winter 2009/2010 was quite cold in Hamburg. We had Temperatures down to -12 C° and the Alster was frozen upto 32 cm thick ice. The river Elbe also was frozen and had a lot of ice. I tried to capture some aspects of this winter, especially in the harbor. One Image I particularly like is a lucky shot out of a window, down into a frozen channel, where some people had left their canoes outside. This is an image where I spontaneously thought: “This is a gift, a chance!”. I find it extremely important to develop this sort of openness towards presents. We can plan images we want to take, make concepts and do whatsever. But sometimes we just stumble upon something we didn’t expect and overlook it, because we didn’t expect it. Taking this image wasn’t particularly difficult. I was “just there”. One day later everything was different, snow smelted, traces of steps on the pier, etc.. – impossible to take this image again. Same with the birds – it was taken from the same window, minutes later. But I changed it a little. On the original image the birds form a diagonal sort of line and I felt, that this arrangement did not really expressed what I felt seeing the scene. So I rotated the image to stack the birds into one vertical row. I believe its much stronger now.

The old Elbtunnel is right in the harbor and can be used by pedestrians and cars alike. I took the image without tripod and with a very long exposure time. So – technically it was wasted. But I didn’t care. Because the light was golden and floating and made me feel like being under a charm in a golden passage of a palace of an incredibly rich caliph from “1001 Nights”. So far for reality … .

The combination of water and ice is particularly interesting to me. The water is dark and the combination with the little ripples on its surface give it a magical quality. The floating ice evokes associations of  a flock of sheep or  a school of whales resting peacefully and mighty in the dark fluid.

Ice and snow can also have a quality of discomfort, dirt and of course chill. I tried to capture these subjective aspects in various images. And I believe a b/w conversion is a good aesthetic means to express this. This is not the cold beauty of blue shimmering ice we know from films or arctic photography, but the dirty uncomfortable aspect of ice in a harbor, where there are rusty and dirty and cold things made of metal, corroded by water and lack of care. This is the depressing aspect of winter and harbor. For some reasons I am not really aware of this aspect also has a romantic flavor. Maybe its this chill and discomfort, which reminds us of our needs of warmth and love and – there we are! So – though taking photographs of this environment is highly interesting and inspiring, I am happy not having to work or live out there, especially in winter.

Another highly interesting and in my eyes beautiful aspect of winter is the lack of color, or the presence of muted color, subdued color. I have a very ambivalant attitude towards color. Generally I believe there is much to much color in many images and its often even distracting. Black an white winter photographs have a strong aesthetic of their own. You can see this in my images from the Alps. But there is a quality of expression in images with subdued color and with isolated color which I really like and  tried to capture in some of the photographs and which can especially be observed in winter. After all this depressing, subdued, aesthetic discomfort I don’t want to forget the fun aspect of winter. And when in Hamburg the Alster is frozen people walk over it and have a lot of fun. When the ice is thick enough they set up “Wurstbuden” on the ice and you can get a freshly grilled German Bratwurst. But that didn’t happen in winter 2009/2010.

When I took this panorama I saw the scene and felt like being in an image of the Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the elder. I particularly felt reminded of his image “The Hunters in the Snow” from 1565.

Should I have whetted your appetite with this snack, you have the chance to eat view all images of this series in the album: Hamburg – Winter 2009/2010. All images were taken with a Canon G11 compact camera.

Thanks for reading and viewing!

~Chris