BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

VENICE DOUBLE EXPOSURES 2013
by STEPHAN THEURICH
BASEL, SWITZERLAND


I show Venice in a different way, like nobody else did it before. Countless Billions of Tourists, Artists and Photographers did not match my different way of thinking, searching, looking and taking this kind of pictures.
These double exposures where shot with my 30 years old Canon A-1 on 35mm film. There is no digital image manipulation, just plain one-to-one scans from the negativ film.
I work in a strongly concentrated manner, searchingnew situations for my pictures . I imagine spontaneously what I could combine in two, sometimes up to three or four shots in this specific double, or multiple exposures. There are three themes I follow in this work:
1. The abstraction comes directly from the light. Sometimes the picture has an overload from this light-information and it is getting even more confused. Sometimes a new form is crystallized and cut out by the light. The light has the power to extinguish information while enhancing contrast and emphasizing details at the same time. These crystallized forms are the essence of that moment and condense the situation to one single newborn abstract form.
2. The mirror technique by turning the Camera over 180 degrees between the two exposures, which gives us the illusion of a new abstract landscape. Sometimes we see a lake without a lake.. The static environment is not truly mirrored but turned around in 180° degree.
3. The time-shift between the two-, or sometimes up to four exposures. -The moving objects like people or animals or boats etc. are different in the next exposure on the same picture. I want to play with the time-shift in a second way, without changing the camera position so we can see what the light will do with the moving objects. The light may show us the transience of these moments, sometimes people walk through people like ghosts, sometimes they appear somewhere else again, sometimes they already disappeared in the second shot.
I will continue with my habit, holding the camera in my hands with my open mind in a medtitative way, searching something behind the scenes. Trying to catch the essence and the spirit of the location engraved by the light, preventing myself, that I never will kill the soul of my pictures with a conceptual strategy.
Stephan Theurich
Basel, July 13, 2015