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w/nw: memorial places


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This picture and the others in your folder are very strong images, Markus. Appropriately still and utterly unpopulated, these pictures offer perspectives that permit -- or even require -- the viewer to reflect upon that place and the atrocities committed there.
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This shot is the best one out of the Buchenwald folder. You need a more disciplined eye IMHO. It is not that the other photos are bad but they are unexciting. There is no strong composition, no strength in the framing. It's like you weren't considering every aspect of the frame when you took the photos.

 

An example: 'Buchenwald - part of the memorial'. Not only is it there nothing interesting about it (although I appreciate you are trying to convey stillness or perhaps contemplation) but the trees poking out from behind on the left side ruin the purity of the shot.

 

I think you have to try again and have a sharper, more critical approach. You really need to work hard at stronger compositions. I think it's possible to have a strong picture and at the same time have that picture convey the mood that you are trying to achieve.

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Markus, I've been to Buchenwald and I took no photos there. I could not.

 

This shot is a not bad shot, but, yes, you need to go back and reshoot. I consider this shot and your folder as notes or a foundation work to a greater work.

 

I find the shot you have posted here especially moving, in spite of its weaknesses, because of the Nazis did to this lovely forest.

 

Buchenwald literally means "book forest." The forest and the landscape around it is beautiful beyond simple narrative. This is where Goethe would take his excursions and (so I'm told) his lovers. It is not far from Weimar. The Nazis built their conscentration camp on one of the most beautiful of Buchenwald's vistas.

 

Buchenwald was apparently not meant to be a factory extermination camp like Auschwitz. But it was an extermination and torture camp nontheless. There is more but I'll cut it short here.

 

The memorial poles amid the forest is a potentially powerful image. I believe this one is 90% there.

 

I cannot imagine how one might do a photographic essay on Buchenwald--I mean to do something that has not been done before. I suggest, however, that the obvious symbols will not do it alone. Look for seemingly incidental details.

 

Good luck.

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It just looks like a snapshot of some poles in the ground. I don't get any significance or "feeling" from it at all.

 

There's no way, in looking at the photo, to see any connection with a "memorial" or of a concentration camp or anything at all. Could be poles for bird houses or water sprinkler pipes, or vent pipes or fertilizer-feed pipes, or unfinished lights of some sort, or poles for snow fences, or...etc.

 

As Galen Rowell said, if you have to explain a photograph, then it isn't really successful; it either appeals or it does not.

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<p><i>Buchenwald literally means "book forest." </i></p>

<p>No, in fact it literally means 'beechforest', where 'beech' is a kind of tree...<br>

am I right that the translation you have comes out of google translator or so, because 'buchen' in german means 'to book', like in 'book a hotel' </p>

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but first of all, thanks for your responses. OK.<p>

 

"Buchenwald" actually comes from the tree "beech". So it simply meand beech forest.<p>

 

<i>It is not that the other photos are bad but they are unexciting.</i><br>

When I was there, I found the whole place - which is very, very huge overall - is, at least

today, a very unexciting place. It only becomes a picture in mind with the additional info

about it. And in my opinion one can't find enough information there, but thats a side-

note. Today it is not a crowded place, historical buildings and memorials built afterwards

are hundreds of meters seperated from another. It is simply difficult to decide, what kind

of pictures to do when you are there. This is the style I decided to do it. Simply pictures to

keep, no art, no tourists in it, none of the explanation "signs".<p>

 

<i>the trees poking out from behind on the left side ruin the purity of the shot.</i><br>

When you are there, the least you wonder about is some trees on the left side of the

frame. But of course you're right for aesthetic quality picture reasons. I appreciate

that.<p>

 

<i>Markus, I've been to Buchenwald and I took no photos there. I could not.</i>

True, as I said before I also had to make a decision here. I understand if one doesn't want

to shoot there at all.<p>

 

<i>I cannot imagine how one might do a photographic essay on Buchenwald--I mean to

do something that has not been done before.</i><br>

True.<p>

 

<i>Hi Markus, nice music on your website!</i><br>

Thanks a lot, I'll check out your link. ;)<p>

 

<i>if you have to explain a photograph, then it isn't really successful</i>

In any case, if you approach to that place in reality, you also won't get an explanation. It is

for the murdered sinthi&roma when I remember correctly and consists of 1000 of those

poles.<p>

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