TORSTEN HENDRICKS TALKS TO BARRY TALIS

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Tell us a bit about yourself
I am a 38-year-old German who has been living with his wife and two boys in Hong Kong for the past six years. 

What was the trigger or inspiration that led to your taking up photography?
Actually, I always enjoyed taking pictures and was also surrounded by photographers, but somehow it never brushed off on me. When I moved to Hong Kong with my wife, I didn’t know a lot of people yet, so I went out with the camera to explore the city, and I just never stopped. 
 

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How does your photography reflect your personality/state of mind?
That is a very difficult question to answer, since I always in a different frame of mind each time I go out to shoot. There are times when I go out and don’t see anything; my mind is spinning around everything else, and I can’t see a single image. The photos I have chosen are mostly from times when I actually don’t remember the walk or how I ended up in that situation…Those are always the walks when I am shooting the most, when I actually see images. So I don’t think that photography really reflects my personality or my state of mind, but that, at these moments, when you see an image, your photography perhaps becomes a natural instinct in which you just get absorbed by your surroundings.
 

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Has your relationship with photography changed over time, and if so, how?
In the last few years, I’ve become more selective about when to press the shutter. I stopped being as trigger-happy and have started to look more and more for what I consider interesting. At the beginning, I was shooting so much, I shot everything. I’ve become more selective with the photos I take as well as the work I look at. 
 

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Please select five of your photos and talk about they came to be and how they reflect your working method

 I enjoy going out and shoot what I find interesting. All of the images below feel like they were taken on the go. I enjoy it when I can freeze a subject in a fleeting, quick moment. I enjoy it when people are moving around and are not static, when the final photo can develop in a moment and be gone the next.

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/purityt/

https://www.instagram.com/torsten.hendricks/

Julie Hrudová talks to Burn My Eye

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Who are you?

Julie. I grew up in Prague, Czech Republic, and moved to The Netherlands with my parents when I was 10. Now I live in Amsterdam, I work as a photographer and a photo editor for a TV station.

What was the trigger, or inspiration, that led to your taking up photography?

A digital camera on the mobile phone when I was a teenager. I was taking a lot of photos, snapshots of friends / family, and on the streets. Also I was given a book about black and white street photography in Paris and looking back it inspired me to photograph more in public space. 

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What do you hope to communicate or describe with your work?

For me an image doesn’t have to clarify anything. I like to obscure things a little. When people ask me how my images came into being I’m hesitant to explain it because it could ruin the fun. Other times I see something and I capture it like it is or like I see it.

Has your relationship with photography changed over time, and if so how?

I don’t think it has changed. It has always been a method to memorise and capture moments. Seeing work from other photographers, it’s easier to recognise patterns and styles and to view my work in perspective. Photography is a mindset as well. Most photographers probably never stop to observe. I make my favourite images on vacations when I’m not ‘obliged’ to photograph. Moreover, I choose not to be a full-time photographer because I was afraid I would dislike something I love when it would become an obligation.

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You curate StreetRepeat on Instagram. Tell us a little about it and how this came about. 

StreetRepeat is an Instagram account I started in January. I feature three photos each time, by different photographers, with one mutual theme. This can be a visual similarity like ‘a red balloon instead of the head’, but also a thematic one like ‘a zombie in a lunch room’.

Street photography has been developing for a long time and it has become more popular in the last couple of years. It’s logical that photographers inspire and imitate each other, especially with the constant stream of images on platforms like Instagram. There are several visual tricks I often come across, but it doesn’t have to be a negative thing. And being photographers, we tend to like similar things that stand out in the public space. The key is to capture it in your own way and sometimes even that can be compared to something already made.

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Has identifying similarity in street changed your views on street photography in general or how you approach and edit your own work?

Interesting question. Maybe a bit. I can spot some visual tricks in my photography as well and I’m sure I was inspired by images I’ve seen earlier. Other times I thought I’ve made something ‘original' and now, having found 5 similar photos, I know I haven’t. That’s the thing with the unconscious mind: seeing so much, we forget what we've seen earlier. So yes, I became slightly more hesitant and I often let go of a situation that would make another image of that kind. On the other hand it’s inevitable to make something that has already been made so it’s pointless to restrict ourselves too much.

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Select a few of your photos and talk about how they came to be and how they reflect your working methods.

This is a selection of images that, I think, represents what I’m trying to do with photography. A bit of humour, a bit of obscurity and an animal here and there. People often ask questions: Where does the hand come from? What happened with her face? Did the dog and the couple manage to stay upright? Unclarity excites me and I hope to turn it into a more coherent theme in my work in the future. 

If you like what you saw and want to view more photos of Julie go and follow her Instagram.

MARTIN MOLINERO TALKS TO DIMITRIS MAKRYGIANNAKIS

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Martín Molinero (Buenos Aires, 1975). Based in Madrid. Member of VIVO Photography Collective https://www.street-photographers.com/

What was the trigger, or inspiration, that led to your taking up photography?

The trigger was a photography workshop given by my uncle when I was 17 years old. It was 1992, a year after I’d come back to Buenos Aires, having lived two years in a tiny little hamlet in Galicia, Spain. The first year in Galicia was tough for the teen urbanite I was. I missed my friends from Argentina and living in a big city. When I finally adjust myself to the country life and I made new friends in Galicia, my fate was that I had to return to Buenos Aires. Having already lost contact with my old friends there, I became sort of a loner. One changes a lot at that age. That was when I discovered the beauty of my hometown and I developed a fondness for taking long walks and wandering the streets of Buenos Aires. So, when my uncle taught me the fundamentals of photography and helped me to get a battered second-hand Minolta, the camera became a much-needed companion for my ramblings and perambulations. Since then, photography became a very important part of my life.

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What do you hope to communicate or describe with your work?

Well, I would like to know it too, though I’m not sure I have that hope. I don’t have an agenda. I just like to walk and observe. I don’t deal with newsworthy events, I don’t intend to describe nor instruct, neither do I consider my photographs art. Perhaps I just hope to “record” some things. You know, I can’t make sense out of whatever I come across at all, but, pretty optimistically, I still believe that I might find a clue about it in a hypothetical future. So I “record” whatever I come across that catch my interest, in order to eventually revisit it. I guess you could consider it a sort of laborious procrastination… What do I hope to record? I mostly take photographs as a sort of informal survey of my surroundings and my inner life. It’s also a way to prompt experiences and remember them. For me, time, transience and memory are a constant source of wonder and perplexity, and the camera’s ability to deceivingly stop time does nothing but enhance that wonder and that perplexity by somehow disturbing the stream of time that keeps rushing past. I’m just still amazed by the strange, unparalleled discontinuity created by photography. Sometimes I like to think that photographs are messages from the past sent to a future self. They go like: “Hey! Take a look at how this was! Look! Do you remember this?!”. I hope these faint vestiges from the past would enrich and somehow increase my experience of the present. You know, there’s this nice, comforting idea in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the idea that memories (and certainly photographs) could be a sort of loophole in Time, a loophole through which one could transfer, from past to present times, supplies, medicines, energy sources…

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Has your relationship with photography changed over time, and if so how?

No doubt it changed a lot. After the first impulse, there was a time, in my early twenties, when I enjoyed much more making prints than taking pictures. My bedroom was my darkroom (or vice versa). I spent many nights making prints, dodging and burning and listening to music. I still miss it. I only shot black and white back then, mostly my friends and some shy, 50 mm street photos. I got a Canon AE-1 and began to shot medium format with a terrible Yashicaflex. I timidly sought to earn some money taking photographs. It didn’t work. I graduated; I moved to Barcelona. When I turned 35, after a decade without taking photographs, my wife gave me a digital camera as a birthday gift. Digital… Terra incognita. Awkward, intangible, ethereal in a bad way, but easier and affordable. So, eight years afterward, here we are. Still going.

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Select 5 of your photos and talk about how they came to be and how they reflect your working methods.

All photos selected here were taken last year.

(1) This photo is very significant for me. I took it while moving to Madrid, after having lived for 14 years in Barcelona. Driving through the desert-like region of Los Monegros (Aragón) towards Madrid, I took the sunrise (or sunset?) and the bull as a good omen, despite of both being rather clumsy, naive representations, a circumstance which could possibly challenge, if not entirely impugn, my optimistic expectations.

(2) Besides the obvious symbolic interpretations prompted by this photo, I like the fact that the hundred-and-fifty-year-old cypress tree whose roots damaged the Azrael’s sculpture is somehow “punished” by being brutishly attached at it. In order to fill the tree trunk from the right side, I held the flash with my left hand and crossed the left arm over my right side, the coiled cord crossing my neck, in a rather contortionist, tortured way somehow appropriate to the subject. A couple of days after taking this photo I went back to this cemetery and, while walking through the gravestones, I heard horrifying howls and terrible whines that made my blood run cold. They were pigs. It turned out there’s a big slaughterhouse next to the cemetery. Can you believe it?

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(3) This photo is one of those gifts that one can get at the least expected moment. The church is known as “Our Lady of Anguish”, Patroness of Aranjuez, whose image is reflected on the glass behind the man. The Virgin’s image, whose face is bathed in tears for further dramatic effect, was re-made in 1940. The original one was burned during the Spanish Civil War.

(4) I took this one while climbing the stairs of the Granada Cathedral. In a fit of second-youth enthusiasm, these nice ladies were sprawled on the steps watching the cathedral upside down. I was lucky to capture the synchronized standing up. I’ve said before that I like recording things. Well, there were thousands of starlings flying around and noisily calling and singing like mad when I took this photo. The flock gradually gathered in a nearby square called “Plaza de la Trinidad” (Trinity Square). I audio-recorded them, as well as the tinkling of cutlery and murmur of conversations emerging from bars and restaurants that surround the square. The noisy starlings and the chatter of the people seemed to reply and mock each other... Ok, none of this is perceptible in the photograph, but this synchronized old ladies’ photograph is intimately linked in my memory with the starlings’ crazy calls and the people’s chatter (all of which has been recorded and stored in this photograph and in a few audio files for further examination...).

(5) I took this one last month. Well, the tree trunk behind the lady is really annoying and the photo is far from being good, but I like how things worked out with this one. I’m still discovering Madrid, which is quite bigger than Barcelona, and I don’t understand yet its different light conditions over the year. Victor Llorente, a true “madrileño” (Madrilenian) and a very fine photographer from NYCSPC, gave me a tip on this street, which is called “Calle Serrano”. In a sort of mundane, pedestrian “veni, vidi, vici” kind of way, I went there, walked three blocks and took this photo. A couple of days afterward, the red decoration crosses weren’t there anymore.

You can see more of Martin's photos and follow him on Instagram