9) BJP November 2016 issue - Klaus Pichler - 13/10/17

Nick suggested I look at BJP's 'The Community Issue' for Klaus Pichler's interview and photographs because they relate to my project idea of capturing people's happiness. Scans of the section in the magazine are scanned in below.

The article itself is about two very different projects on subcultures. The first being focused on on Vienna's disappearing dive bars and its dying clientele and bar culture in the first part, and in the second he focuses on the 'cultish' world of esotericism - "Western esotericism (also called esotericism and esoterism), also known as the Western Mystery Tradition, is a scholarly term for a wide range of loosely related ideas and movements which have developed within Western society." (definition taken from Google).

Although my idea relates more to the second part of the article, I did still find some interesting points in his work on the dive bars. One thing that I took away from the article was this section "Working with a writer was important for Pichler - it helped give his images cultural grounding and elevated them above the superficial" because I want to make sure my own images are accessible to the viewer and can be interpreted by people other than myself, considering my idea is photographing my own/other people's happiness. Therefore writing some short captions or even interviews may illuminate my work better.

My project also relates to this article in the sense that esotericism is a belief system that people turn to as a way of finding happiness - for instance Pichler said that "two friends of mine disappeared from my life through esotericism: one through meditation and the other through a psychological crisis, where he began to feel energies and thought these energies were entities".

I think I prefer his esotericism work over the dive bar project, so I'm going to talk about a few of my favourite images below in more depth.

I really like this studio still life shot because its using props to represent the idea of esotericism instead of depicting people in these unusual faiths. This is something I'd like to do with my project because I really want to push my studio work and I think my ideas will be represented in a stronger way. I like the idea of using colourful backdrops and carefully placed lighting to give more prominence to the props being photographed, and to make my images look playful.

This is another one of my favourite images because I can appreciate the technical side behind it and how placing himself in the exact right spot for the photograph must have taken a lot of time and planning. I feel this image could make the viewer quite inquisitive from the weirdly faultless placement of the individuals and their bright white clothing against the green landscape.

Again I really like these studio still life shots for the same reason as the above one, all showing themes of vibrancy, minimalist composition and playfulness.

When first reading this article I didn't think it related to my project in any way whatsoever, however once you begin analysing the images and picking apart the writing, you can find some really inspiring material! These images are going to influence my shoots as well as recalling the writing for further pointers for my work. Following on from this, my next steps are to keep researching around my idea and get shooting!

#obsessions #research