Author: JH

I’ve done some serious housekeeping today regarding my website. That included the delicious task to write up some sort of a bio. As my favorite author said: “They keep asking for a photo and a bio. What a photo and a bio have to do with a man’s work, I dunno.” Well, this is a far as I’ll go:

“I live in Berlin and Manhattan, and suffer from a serious desire for living in the Italian Alps. Between the former two, I do prefer Manhattan. It’s an attitude thing. For example, Berlin cab drivers have a tendency to slow down from their average 15 mph to about 5 mph in front of every green light until it turns red; meanwhile, “my” personal Town Car record from JFK to the West Side, achieved by a Pakistani driver, is 33 minutes, with an even more remarkable third place held by an Italian: 47 minutes during a severe snow storm, and no toll.

I started my professional life as a lawyer in one of Germany’s fiercest firms for criminal law. But I could not stand the idea of being tied to anything, not even to the very outskirts of society, for the rest of my life, and left after two years. I now occasionally miss being in an environment where everybody is smarter than I am, but other than that, I have no regrets. I have held leading positions in what some refer to as the “creative industry”, including major editing, design and exhibition projects both in Germany and the US. My images have been used by companies such as Microsoft, Penguin Putnam Inc., Random House Publishing, BMW, Sun Microsystems, United Airlines, Oracle and Citibank.

Prints of my work have sold to collectors both in Europe and the US. This site and my blog, Notes From Nowhere, evolve with my work and show what I am about. My personal projects include “Life In Exile”, “What It Is Like To Be A Traffic Cone”, “The Manhattan Project”, “The End Of The Nuclear Winter”, “The Mountain Project”, and others.

My girlfriend is a philosophy professor, and we have several great books.”

Since I started to use cameras, I kept pondering all the usual questions: This format or that, this brand or that, this camera or that, this lens or that, black and white or color, and so forth. I am not into the “horses for courses” approach. I want one camera, one lens, one medium, and be done with it. The less gear, the harder I work, the better I know what I do, the better the results. Also, each piece of equipment introduces its own shortcomings and flaws, so the less you have, the less time you spend testing and dealing with the repair facilities of your brand. Finally, I actually do like the limitations introduced e.g. by one format, by not cropping after the fact, etc., and use them to my advantage.

There is now at least one exception though: With digital, you can decide later if an image is going to be color or black and white. Maybe not really: In the moment you take the image, you should know. But you don’t have to know when you get up in the morning. Of course working in color has become much more attractive with the combination of digital cameras, Photoshop and color management, because you are in control over the end result. But I sometimes wonder if this high is about to fade. Looking at the photography listed at Conscientious (e.g. check out the link to European Photography), certainly the best source of information for where photography stands today, I can’t help but feel that the control over color that we now all have has lead to a certain uniformity of contemporary photography.

This is part of the reason why I’m now more and more coming around to subjects that work particularly well in black and white. The new Mountain Project is an example for that. It will take me another week or two to work on the files of the first part of the series and put them online here, and I’ll follow that up with further images in the summer. Since I am mostly associated with my work in color and since some people like to think of the world as being populated by one trick ponies only, there is a certain challenge for me in making such a new project consistent with what I already have. As some uneasy Art Director once famously asked after looking at the portfolio of a commercial photographer: “This is great, but, ummmh, can you do verticals too?” Yes, I can.

Having spent a considerable part of my life in editing, both photography and text, I do believe in the grueling necessity of it. This obviously includes my own photography. The editing may be even more important than taking the images in the first place. I am convinced that no matter how good you may be, if you choose the wrong images, the result will be mediocre at best. Hence, although I have edited roughly two million images of other people over the past ten years, I don’t ever do the final edit of my own work – you just can’t edit your own images with a 100 percent success rate. But you can choose people who are good at it (and avoid those who are not).

All this, unfortunately, also means that I’m not going to publish some really nasty observations from my plane trip back to New York. I had already written them up in great, germ dripping detail. While I have, at times, a weak spot for observations concerning the abysses of human behavior, my poor copy editor now thinks she can’t eat for a couple of days, after reading the draft of what I still consider to be a very noteworthy blog entry about the passenger on seat 24 D on an undisclosed flight to New York this past Sunday. Well.

Meanwhile, I’m working on nearly two gigabytes of raw files from the Italian Alps. I’m trying to chase these through Photoshop before the virus that I probably caught on that plane gets me… but I say no more.

The complete new series soon, here, I hope…