“What? You don’t take your camera with you on your travels?” This is something I, Danielle regularly get to hear when I come back from a trip having no awesome photos in my luggage again. “I don’t photograph landscapes, I want to see these places with my eyes, not through my camera lens.” I do like to note then. “You could take pictures of us,” my boyfriend suggested a few weeks before our planned trip to Iceland in fall 2019. “But then we would have to do that without clothes. Otherwise, it makes no sense to me creatively.” “It’s okay with me,” my boyfriend Johannes just said.
When we show our travel pictures around, we are often asked how one would even come up with such an idea. Basically, it is not far from what I usually photograph. Johannes, on the other hand, had nothing to do with photo stuff before. That he then came up with the idea of self-portraits is probably simply due to a spontaneous idea. We would like to claim to have had particularly profound intentions, but in fact we just did it for us. And this is how everything begun. Iceland has been our starting point.
Most landscape photographers take a lot of time for their pictures. The compositions and light situations are deliberately chosen. Many drive several times to the same place and wait for THE moment when the light is perfect. Our pictures, however, are taken along the way. We can neither choose the light nor the exact time of day, but have to cope with the situation as it is. That’s why we don’t see ourselves as landscape photographers, because we’re not interested in the perfect picture, with perfect light. We sit in a rental car, drive through the area sometimes more sometimes less planned, enjoy our travels and sometimes take a picture. If we particularly like it somewhere, we stop, get out, take the picture and drive on. But the focus is on the experience of the trip, not on bringing back the most exciting pictures possible. When we go for walks or hikes along the way, we just take the equipment with us. So it’s often the same situation where people stop briefly on vacation and whip out their cell phones to quickly take a souvenir picture. We’re no different from other tourists in that aspect.
When we came back from Iceland, we had many pictures in our luggage and also decided that this should become an ongoing project, a new common hobby. In the summer of 2020, it should then go to Scotland and despite the worldwide pandemic, we were able to realize this in accordance with the measures. I often notice my lack of experience with landscape photography myself. Sometimes we take a picture in 2 minutes, sometimes in half an hour, and sometimes we let it go. Fortunately, we agree on many principles. Furthermore, we always agreed that our nudes should be covered.
Johannes had wanted to continue the project in our own country – Germany.
This is a project we are doing primarily for ourselves. There are many people who like the pictures, but also many who are bothered by the fact that we may not fit typical body ideals. It’s my personal believe that the look of our bodies is unimportant for our kind of art.
So I like to imagine us working on this project in different stages of life. This project for me is not tied to how we currently look, it is tied to us as a couple. Maybe we will be fatter, more misshapen, grayer, more wrinkled, older for sure… But I believe that none of that will matter. Because the pictures are a personal travel diary for us, a personal timeline of our time together.
More info: Instagram
1
0