First week we went to Hannover. Here I was amazed about the differences between new and old architecture.  The colorful old town-hall next to a full glass building.

Here are some photos from both new and old Hannover. More photos later.

My new Job  brought me for more than a month in Germany. Here I used every free hour to take pictures that would feed my memories later, but I also took pictures that I want you to see and enjoy the places I visited.

First of all, I spent my nights at Hotel Kronprinz in Bad Salzdetfurt (it’s a small village near Hannover, in Niedersachsen).

Here are some pictures of this friendly village.

Fashion photography is carried out in order to sell clothes; it is a part of the wider advertising industry and exploits desires and aspirations through reference to lifestyles. As such, it is an unapologetic appropriator of styles and techniques. This poses questions about the meaning of street photography ­ if it includes fashion photography ­ and about its place, too, in the canon of art photography. While you might at first see fashion photography as different because it is commercial, perhaps it is rather a good example of the need to contrive in all photography. Looking at fashion photographs we wonder to what extent other, apparently spontaneous, photographs were contrived. The idea that fashion photography represents a debasement of the medium must be challenged at a time when the visual language of advertising has permeated “high” art. In any case, the “captured moment” in its diversity and manipulation, is the basis for all photography.

Perhaps categories of photography exist not only because of context or subject but because of the need for definitions within a medium that has been widely employed by amateurs, technicians and professionals in many fields. Bourdieu sees that problems of definition in photography place it outside the cultural hierarchy. The “uneducated” consumer ­ his phrase ­ feels able to view and judge photographs without having to acquire the kind of specialist knowledge necessary for mainstream art. His view that photography falls outside the “consecrated arts” does not prevent those inside attempting to appropriate and/or marginalise it. Fashion photography falls between art and commerce. Donovan, Klein and Tillmans have worked in the fashion business. Donovan, although his work was not confined to fashion, worked in the commercial world. Klein and Tillmans have moved between the commercial and art worlds. Klein’s preoccupation in the 1950s with intervention ­ in relation to his subjects and during processing ­ can be seen in his fashion and street photos. He got into the action and later, during processing, bleached and cropped his images for a highly contrasted, grainy effect. That he was influenced by documentary photo and cinéma vérité is clear, but, in the fashion shots, vérité has given way to cinema. He actually acknowledged being influenced by Cecil Beaton.

Even the greatest and most original of photographers must respond to the commercial imperative. Klein’s extremely and obviously contrived fashion photos have a formality that is not seen in Tillmans’ images. Tillmans, like Klein, has done a lot of fashion work and, according to Russell Ferguson, “all of his various types of photos can be shown together producing an over-archingly structural view of urban life. He has been working through the past decade at the same time as certain fashion photographers have aimed at a particular realism that reflects aspects of urban life.” Corinne Day’s photographs of Kate Moss caused a sensation in the 1990s ­ they were too realistic, even though carefully staged and no more “real” than Mike Leigh’s films.
The acceptance of photography as part of the art world took place in the 1960s and, since then, it has come to displace painting. As a result, artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall can now bring narrative into fine art photography. Their styles are very different: Jeff Wall building a kind of realism and Cindy Sherman working within a fantasy world. We can see both approaches mirrored in contemporary fashion photography. So I seem to be coming down on the side of fashion not being separate from mainstream photography; how can it be otherwise when Tillmans won the Turner Prize last year? Fashion may be regarded as a category of photography, but it has had a symbiotic relationship with art photography, both through its practitioners and as a reflection of movements and styles.
An article by Catherine Atherton

From Roger Fenton’s prints of the Crimea to mobile-phone images of Baghdad, every era of war photography has been marked by new technology. But what has always mattered more than technical brilliance, argues Geoff Dyer, is getting close enough to the epicenter of history.

Geoff Dyer’s text is about Robert Capa’s photography. He debates the authenticity of war photography, specially the famous “Falling Soldier” picture.

“The Falling Soldier” shows the moment of a republican soldier’s death in the Spanish civil war. Or so it was claimed and widely believed. Then doubts began to circulate. Perhaps the picture was posed, fake. Capa’s biographer, Richard Whelan, has gnawed away at this issue for decades. The explanation put forward by him in the catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Barbican is that, during an informal truce, a group of soldiers simulated a bit of a battle charge for the benefit of the camera. Fearing a genuine attack was being mounted, enemy troops opened fire. The trigger was pulled, the camera clicked simultaneously – and a man died. Make-believe became tragically real.

Whelan’s explanation is unlikely to be improved on, but it is worth considering something that David Simon, in his book Homicide, learned from ballistics experts: that “no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet”. This is not to say that people don’t fall down when shot. They do, but only as “a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do.”

This adds an unexpected twist to the moment of simulation, but there is a larger irony too: the more one learns about the circumstances in which Capa made his famous photograph, the less those circumstances matter. Even if it is now established that this is what happened, it is too late. Over the years, the photograph has come adrift from those circumstances, floated clear of what it depicts. One of the standard ideas about photography is that it is strong as evidence, weak in meaning. The Falling Soldier shows this formulation in reverse: it has become more and more questionable as evidence, but its meaning has continued to deepen. Somehow the image is able to accommodate all the different accounts of its making, accounts that have themselves assumed the quality of after-the-fact interpretation. Ultimately, the only proof it offers is of something that has long been accepted – that photographs can be as mysterious as works of art.

Capa said that he would rather have “a strong image that is technically bad than vice versa”. He realized early on that a little camera-shake created a dangerous air of bullets whirring overhead. In certain circumstances, then, technical imperfection could be a source of visual strength. When his pictures of the D-day landings were published in Life magazine, a caption explained that the “immense excitement of the moment made Capa move his camera”. The blurring actually came later, as a result of a printing error at the lab in London. In the excitement of receiving Capa’s films, most of the 72 pictures were completely ruined. Eleven survived, all wounded, maimed, but the darkroom accident imbued them with sea-drenched authenticity and unprecedented immediacy.

Alongside the Capa exhibition is another devoted to Gerda Taro, who died in June 1937, aged 26. Taro and Capa were lovers and collaborators, sometimes working together under the rubric “Capa & Taro Reportage”. After her death, and due to Capa’s increasing fame, Taro gradually faded from photographic history, except as girlfriend of the great war photographer. Through no fault of Capa’s, several pictures now known to be by Taro were attributed to him. Leaving the gender politics aside, such confusion is hardly surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out in the early 1970s, “the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer’s work from another’s, except insofar as he or she has monopolised a particular subject.”

NOTE: If a directory contains too many files, It will load the thumbs very slow. I keep about a maximum 2BG pictures in one folder

How to Back-up
As for the back-up, I make two back-ups:
ONE: on dvd-s
TWO: on an external hard drive (currently 500GB)