Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Wait to Walk



I seem to be caught in a German photo-warp right now - Helmut Newton, Albrecht Tubke, Juergen Teller – and much more to come, I promise.

Today’s discovery is Florian Bohm. A 39 year old German living in New York, Bohm takes the familiar DiCorcian concept of modern color street photography, narrows it down to the single moment of people waiting to cross the street, and repeatedly nails it. He’s not breaking any new ground but the self-imposed restriction of photographing entirely on the streets of New York gives the work a consistency and an immediacy, and there’s a nice flat quality to the light that helps pull it all together. The pictures above and below all come from Bohm’s book “Wait to Walk” published last year by Hatje Cantz.







6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love candid pictures like this.Love the natural expressions

Fredde Ahlstrom Cooney said...

Another German to check out is Oliver Boberg. I was stunned first time I saw his work. Clean, calm shots of ones average concrete environment.

Very inspiring! Love stuff that teaches me to "See" so my wife gave me his book for birthday.
Now I know how he does it... and I was surprised.

Apparently his work was shown at DCKT Contemporary in -06.
www.dcktcontemporary.com

/Fredrik
ahlstrom.inc.se

Joanna Goddard said...

great energy and personality.i love how everyone has on their "default" expression, just how their face naturall goes when they're not really doing anything....i wonder what they're all thinking about....

thanks for this! i am really enjoying your blog.

Paul Pincus said...

Joanna is right about everyone's default expression. Interesting.

indigo16 said...

This is exactly the kind of 'story' I try to get my students to develop. Astonishingly simple but exquisite in its execution. Thank you.

Barry said...

Danziger observes the flat quality of light in these images. If we look carefully, everything in these images is flat.

The faces are "flat" -- the default look that another commentator noted.

The plane of the figures lined up at the curb is flat.

In every image, the street in front of the figures extends about six feet, created a uniformity, a flatness, in each image.

Even the striped lines of the crosswalk in front of the figures supports the overall sense of a compressed 2-dimensionality.

Maybe this formal rigidity is why I quickly get the "seen one, seen 'em all" feeling as I scroll through the images.