Redwood Pieces

How can I present my photos?
I made positives from the pinhole negatives using 40 years old ORWO (made in the GDR) paper which is still amazingly awake and alive and gives me crisp results! I develop them in coffee / turmeric / bark tea / kelp-coffee …. and some more.
I thought about wood pieces. Noel (one of the two founders of North Street Collective) said: „Oh! I have lots! You can have them!“, came over with his gigantic chainsaw and sawed me some little pieces.
Pictures of tree, developed in tree, mounted on tree. I love it!

TinType Fake App

I love it! People think, me as a puristic super 8 filmmaker would hate these fake apps but on the contrary, I love my 8mm app and my TinType app!

(“A tintype, also known as a melainotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion”, says Wiki)

(“This incredible filtering tool will have you looking old-timey in no time”, says the app)

Illy On The Beach

I put my favourite pinhole camera on the beach and let it take dramatic pictures!! 🙂
In the can: a piece of black & white negative sheet film. Put it on a piece of photo paper – FOMAbrom baryta – so I receive a positive image! Develop it in Caffenol … which seems to give it an extra dramatic tone! Brown-greyish. I love it!

CC Rider 65

I’m in love with the bus line 65 that takes me from Willits to Fort Bragg. 32 miles. A curvy street through the forest. A trip a little more than 1 hour. A 16 seater van.
Today, a hot day, a crisp blue bright day. Pure beauty for a long moment, I forget everything, all the shit and crap and assholes that are about to kill our wonderful earth and for a moment it all swooooshes in the unimportant background, there is only the bus and us 3 women on bord and rock’n’roll in the bus radio and countless glimpses of beauty looking through the window. Even Bob Dylan does not ruin my mood. Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes – Daddy’s in the alley, he’s lookin‘ for food – I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.

CC Rider by Chuck Willis

Cowboy Sage

Cowboy sage (Artemisia californica) smells strong and makes a good, powerful developer!
„It is endemic to the California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion, in coastal sage scrub, coastal strand, chaparral, and dry foothill communities“ says Wikipedia!
„In the past it was employed as a treatment to fight coughs and colds by the Cahuilla natives. They chewed the leaves, either dried or fresh. It was used by women of the Cahuilla and Tongva to alleviate menstrual cramps and to ease labor.“ I love it!

Little Beauties In My Garden

My first week’s circle is quite narrow: I wander through the village, I get to know my streets, my neighborhood and all the plants in our garden. My pinhole synapse itches! I brought two pinhole cameras made from a coffee and a spice can. Simple but wonderful. I browse the garden and get attracted by tomato plants, by peppermint, by pink lillies, by a planetlike flower, already dried, by other unknown garden fellows.

I take small photos (negatives), develop them in Caffenol (instant coffee, washing soda, vitamine c), and then later at night when it’s dark I lock myself in my improvised darkroom and make sandwich prints on paper. Then I have positives! Testing them with Caffenol, later then probably in their matching soups (tomato picture – tomato soup!!)

Come back!

First Week In Willits

… in North California. I am a lucky artist, I got an artist-in-residency here up North in Mendocino County where the sky is high and blue, marihuana lingers in the air and the wild ocean is so close! Actually 33 miles and there’s a bus going there but only twice a day … not more, why, everybody has a car in oil wonderland! No, that’s not true, I see cyclists. I realize bike lanes. It’s California!

I live in a sweet village house together with two other female artists and I love our daily life: someone makes tea, someone talks to the phone organizing poetry congresses, someone is looking for walnuts to dye something, someone sits on a withered wooden chair leaning on our (our!) garden redwood tree, someone stirs magic developer made from cowboy sage (me!!) and falls in love with the huge outdoor sink every single day …

7 more weeks!

Thousand Miles Through California

One week on the road, together with my friends Lisa and Paolo from Echo Park Film Center Los Angeles, sponsored by lovely and generous Goethe-Institut, because it’s „wunderbar together“ year, deutsch-amerikanische Freundschaft! Kennt noch jemand DAF by the way???

Starting in LA, ending in Willits, where my 8 weeks residency at The North Street Collective begins …..

Passing through cities, villages and hamlets, over passes and bridges and wild rivers, giving workshops and showing films, driving through deserts and sierras and yummy smelling pine woods and more North: redwoods with our truck & trailer. So huge, so beautiful, so vast, so divers …. and the knowledge that only roughly 170 years ago it belonged to other people … until the ever greedy and killingly spreading Europeans came and stole it is always present. How can one NOT think of it?

Yuba, Manzanar, Lone Pine, Carson City (driving on 9, lalalalala, hello Breeders!), hot days, cold nights, bear-tight boxes, ugly and empty Casinos, cowboy sage, welcoming people, Mo, Colleen and Adele, Larry Spring Museum, Earl, Chickenleather, Thea, Deb, Deb! Les & Meredith, the white haired Lady with no name and a dog called Wally, Melody, the 10 hours talking man …..

Thank you.

The Spice Of Life

Lisa and me! Sisters in film and workshop …. we did one together today, processed TriX b&w film in hot and spicy ingredients like turmeric, black pepper and extra hot Mexican chili. The results are fantastic, super high contrast (thank you, bright Los Angeles sunlight!!). We spread enthusiasm! Love for analog, wabisabi and the small things that breathe beauty.
A big thank you goes out to: „Wunderbar Together: Germany and the US“, an initiative funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by Goethe Institut and supported by BDI The Voice of Germany Industry. …. for shipping me over. No, flying. By the way: the American Airlines meal is really good! Cheers!!

Devil‘s Lake Vibes

I love my Teufelssee, my Devil‘s Lake. Situated in the West of Berlin, in Grunewald, quite small, but attractive for all overheated Berliners and tourists. We mingle. We are clothed or naked. We are hippies and hipsters, old, very old and medium. The vibe is very very relaxed and pleasant.

It’s a very old, glacial lake, rather deep, that is why it stays much cooler for longer than other lakes around – ideal when temperatures in the city rise above 30. Or 35.

I definitely adore it.

Smoking Key Man

I found the very best locksmith in Berlin!
I have an over 100 years old door key which I wanted to have duplicated … impossible for almost everyone except for – tadaaaa – Walter Heise in Berlin-Neukölln, Emserstrasse 27. The real Walter doesn’t live anymore, but I like the guys inside, all smoking old men (the shop smells! I like it, gives me a feeling that they are really busy and don’t give a shit about non-smoking fashion), with funny phrases and jokes on their lips, and a gigantic wall of keys from which Smoking Man number one fished the right model in no time with a long fishing rod.

Pastagram

I am very very intrigued by a new method to create beautiful images using parts of plants and their inner phenols plus ecological developer aka washing soda and vitamin c! Read Karel’s blog please!
I invented something new: pastagram!
I soaked pasta pieces (Buchstabennudeln/letter noodles) in a developer soup and then placed them on super 8 stripes. In plain daylight!!
After a while I brushed them off and fixed the stripe. The result is not very amazing … looks like a leopard … but anyway … to be continued!!!!

Pep Casolare

My favourite pizzeria Casolare has two puppets in the front window which look like Pep Ventura. Pep Ventura, who is it?

Pep Ventura was a Catalan musician. A poor boy who lived with his grandfather and played on handmade flutes. He spiced up the Cobla and the Sardana with new flutes and composed 550 songs.

I made a film (click here to watch it!) … inspired by Barcelona, my own personal craziness, Wiki information and music.

Photos © Bernd Brundert