Author: JH

Scanning old work is a little bit like looking through a family photo album. I decided to use the Imacon. The best thing about it is that it forces you to do a super-tight edit beforehand, because it makes the scanning an even more tedious experience, compared to using one of the standard Nikon scanners. But the quality from the Imacon is quite exceptional. Anyway, above is a photo of a French movie star in some café in Kreuzberg (in keeping with stereotypes about French artists, she is fashionably bored).

This photo, above, is of a musician at an open air concert somewhere in Berlin Mitte. It kind of proves that I am really not an editorial photographer. The next photo, below, is from a brief trip to the Ostsee. At the time, some of the old sea resorts there were being remodeled, reminiscent of pre-war times when they were the getaway of well to do Berliners. While it was nice there, the food was uneatable, so I never returned (have you ever seen your companion in a restaurant secretly pour her coffee into a plastic plant pot behind her, like in some slapstick act? I have).

Finally, below, here’s one from my “Berlin Walls” series, from 1999, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I did that series for a Berlin exhibition I was working for at the time, and it veered off into my first personal project that saw international publication. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to give away the rights for most of the better images from that series, so it is useless for me today. You live and learn.

Finally, it has happened. During the last couple of years, when going back and forth between Germany and the US, with every trip I brought my German toothpaste to Manhattan. At some point it usually ran out, and I had to use, grudgingly, one of the odd-tasting, much more aggressive seeming American brands for the remaining time. This time, I packed my American toothpaste going back to Europe, and don’t intend to switch back.

Same with prescription free medications. A simple pill against headaches comes in some purplish pink in the US. German tablets come in shades of white, taste bitter, and are ridiculously big. Simple marketing – the actual chemical substance that is supposed to affect the pain is identical (Ibuprofen, for example) down to the last gram. But studies have found that Americans respond better to purple painkillers compared to tablets that come in some boring color. With Germans, it seems to be the other way round, and German expatriates usually swear that the colorful American tablets are of no use.

For better or worse, I’m not into substance abuse, but whenever I have a headache, I’ve come to love the purple, American pills (which wouldn’t have any effect on me the first few times I took them). The big, whitish German tablets now seem entirely anachronistic to me, and I’ve stopped using them altogether.

So that’s what happened to Odysseus too, right? At least that’s what I understood from this hero’s travels. When he and his comrades get to some strange place, they try and not consume any of the strange food, because *it makes you forget home* (and Penelope! so even divine food, as offered by Calypso, is out). But there’s temptation! And there’s starvation, and sometimes one just has to try the strange stuff. And then these terrible things happen, and you find yourself unable to expect any relief from whitish Ibuprofen, and your teeth don’t feel clean enough without American whiteners. So, that’s the things that you better don’t tell your family at home. Like Penelope, they might seriously resent it.

I am at a point in my life where I judge a city solely by how much I like its traffic cones. Baltimore, in that regard, ranks very high.