To photograph(er)s in Bautzen

On Wednesday, 18 March, I travelled to Bautzen, where I had arranged a meeting with the local photography club Fotofreunde Bautzen. The club has twelve members and meets regularly once a month for sessions that last until late in the evening. And these are definitely not just “casual chats about photography”.

The programme was surprisingly intensive – a joint evaluation of photographs from the past month (anonymous and very honest), the selection of the photo of the month, which is then featured on the club’s website homepage until the next round of voting, discussions about photography competitions, as well as reflections on how photography as a field is evolving. It was interesting to see how openly and at the same time matter-of-factly they give each other feedback. 

By the way, the photograph titled “Captured in Glass” (by Steffen Hejduska) was selected as the Photo of the Month, and it was the one I voted for as well. I really liked it very much, and you can view it in the gallery below this article.

I came to Bautzen mainly to discuss the details of a joint Czech-German photography trip that we are preparing within the InterBridge project. I had already been in email contact with the club’s leader, Sylvia Mönnich, and another member, Frieder Molineus, but meeting the club members in person moved everything forward significantly. The language barrier turned out to be less of a problem than one might expect – a great help was one of the younger members of the photography club, Thomas Neumann, who kindly translated from English into German.

We agreed on a date in May and, most importantly, on where we would actually go. The strongest response from our proposed options was received by the former military area of Ralsko, which offers not only a strong trace of recent history, but also deeper layers of older Czech-German history. An ideal combination for photographers: landscape, urbex, memory of place and traces of history.

The group will be intentionally smaller so that everyone has enough space to photograph comfortably. Some of the participants will come from the Bautzen photography club, while the rest will be complemented by participants from the University of the Third Age at TUL, who are also engaged in photography as part of their studies. These are therefore not random “tourists”, but people who are interested in thinking about images and learning something new – from each other and across borders.

The outcome should not be just the experience itself. We expect that photographs will be created from which we will prepare a small e-publication and most likely also an exhibition. We will see how it naturally develops.

And because InterBridge is not only about art but also about science, there was also a small improvised “research moment”. By coincidence, I had with me images from an electron microscope – thin layers of metals on textile materials – and this quickly led to an interesting discussion about materials, structure and the nature of images as such. It turned out that there is a surprisingly close relationship between science and photography. The whole evening was not only pleasant but also inspiring. And although I eventually declined the invitation to dinner because it was already quite late, I at least had an excellent apple strudel with ice cream.

The next day, I walked through Bautzen itself – a beautiful historic town that offers many visually interesting objects and corners. So even I, as a complete amateur photographer, am adding a few of my own photographs.

Now I am just looking forward to the photography trip in May. If the atmosphere is at least half as pleasant as during this meeting, we definitely have something to look forward to.

Hana Křížová

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Autor: S. Hejduska