Work

On the series

Writing things down has saved me from buying the same tool twice many times, most recently one wet weekend in November. The tones in this series are as Delta 3200 rendered them, soft and slightly faded. Weather was the main character of the series, especially the sea fog in early summer, which emptied the streets. Some of these were taken while waiting for trains, others from a ferry on the way to the market square.

There is no grand plan behind any of this, just tidying up before stopping whenever the weather allows. I still carry a pencil and a cheap notebook almost everywhere, a habit picked up from an uncle with a very full shed.

Whenever I have a free hour, I usually end up on the train into Basel with a drawer of string and tape. I printed contact sheets at a borrowed workbench and chose the frames with the woman who runs the hardware shop.

I would rather do one thing slowly than five things in a hurry, and years of the occasional bike ride taught me that. These photographs were made over several visits with the Ricoh GR, starting one autumn morning. The order of the pictures follows the order they were made in rather than the dates on the negatives.

Most frames were shot on the Ricoh GR with Delta 3200, processed at a small lab in Basel. In 2017 I moved to Basel, which made small repairs much easier to fit into a week. Most visits to the fields started on grey October mornings and ended when the film ran out.

I printed a handful of these for a small group show in Basel. Most of my reading happens on the balcony, a chapter or two at a time, with a cheap desk lamp close by.

My grandmother once told me to stop while it is still fun, and it has served me well ever since. Oddly enough, there is a quietness to the piers on Monday afternoons that I tried hard to keep. Weekends are usually split between evening classes, cooking for friends and whatever is half-finished on the back step.