Dagies Blog

Wow ….. that was my very first developing performance … outside my intimate bathroom. Avantfilm, you’re my hero.
I filmed a roll of TriX super 8 film in Stockholm, filled two Jobo tanks each with 4 meter stripes of it, collected flowers, leaves and birch bark in Stockholm and Karlstad (thank you Stina!), filled my water bottle with lake water from Lake Vänern (light yellow) and prepared tea. And Caffenol. Added Aqvavit. Did it – with a superlovely participating audience who set their phones on 10 minutes developing time countdown and at precise ringalingadingdong the show was over, the film developed, I fixed it, hung it up at the gallery ceiling and what? Images! Hooray!!!

I sat on a bench for a while at Gamla Stan and watched trains. Realized that they have names! Also realized after a while that the fence between the two trails are … art. One part regular wire, the next bent and twisted and broken in a sympathico way. The next part regular again ….

… and then: byebye Stockholm, hello Karlstad!

Hey wasps, come here, gather around my marmelade! Strawberry! Yummy! Celebrate these last days of summer with me!

All my developing recipes (for black & white negative processing) are online now! Nicely knit in a wordpress site!
Have a look! Yumyumsoups!

… belongs to Patti!
Wow, that was one of the best concerts ever in my life, I’m still sweaty smelly and glowing, Patti Smith @ Tempodrom in Berlin, the Horses Concert. She’s so cool, I wanna be like her when I’m old, oops, I’m close before, she’s not that much older, wearing her rock’n’roll gray hair like a timeless angel, smiling about 15 times towards us, the loving audience. Power galore and all these horses songs that catapult me back when I was still at school and sweaty and smelly and in love with the wrong guy and dancing my barefoot feet away in Halle / Westfalen.
Sorry for the bad iPhone picture (3gs), Patti beams that much! I love her for her music, her power, her beauty, her lyrics, her yelling out messages. Multiplying earth and life love, I hope.

I shot some colour film cassettes for my 2015 „Ode To June“ film and developed them myself. Colour reversal in E6. Something must have happened with the last cassettes, the chemicals became weird? Was it too tropical outside? Did I shake the film too little while it was bathing in its colour developer?
Anyway … I got something that you can never get if you want to have it like that on purpose … the film solarised. The result is 2 minutes of the most beautiful bizarre dreamy images I ever shot!

There is a new venue in Berlin. In Berlin-Wedding. A former crematorium. Sounds spooky but is not at all. Silent Green. The official opening will be in autumn this year, but the unofficial has just taken place: music and films and wine and dance and a beautiful summer night! Good souls lingering! Me showing films (here you see a super 8 projection of „Butterfly kisses“. And a wonderful slide installation all around!

Photo © Tom Grenz

Fuji color sheet film from the back. Coffee can pinhole photo.

This was an old colour film … I crammed it into my curry pinhole camera, set it on Michis windowsill .. et voilà: a weird photo of Berlin’s back yard through summer flowers!!

How I love what I do! People google how to develop long dead film formats, colour and black&white, that no film lab would develop any more because film gelatine parts might peel off …. well, they find me. I do it!
Recently I had an Agfa CNS 110-20 – small format colour negative film which I developed carefully and got at least some pale images with some beautiful mistakes … perhaps condensed fluid that had settled on the film layer over the years … the decades??
Anyway … I save images and I love it.

Film and photo makers meet on the Tempelhof Field!

There are days like this. Magic in a way. Let me try to explain. The sky opens and the sun sweeps all winter lints away. Suddenly you see clear: dirt, poisonous souls, capitalist patterns, squeaky brakes … and all I can say is that I want to play another game. I mean no game. I rely on my network. Close doors, open windows. Stay tuned!

Another 9 hour working day and I rode my bike to the Sparkasse at Kottbusser Tor to get me some pizza money and then when I left there was a gentle man who opened the door for me and I gave him some cents and then there was a bunch of young bearded men turning up looking ambitious and hipsterish-soft carrying coffee Thermoskannen and cups with them asking the homeless (I guess) person if he wanted a fresh coffee and he nodded and I nodded too because at that very moment I perfectly knew what it’s all about.

Bunnies lay their eggs! Chicken too! Supermarkets are full of them! Say hello to spring! It’s coming!

Winter, cold, grey light, crazy films – it’s Dresdner Schmalfilmtage again!
My favourite place is the bar, this year enlightened with cineastic lumière light letters! My second favourite place is of course the cinema … and my favourite film this year is Hungry Bones, a film about calcium pills, stars, universe, self consuming body desease – told in a very beautiful way using pixelation, time-lapse, self-animation and drawings. Inspiring!