My Inside Turned Out

 

An Illusion That I've Lived For Almost Thirty Years

 

In 1983 at the age of 12 I wrote my first little piece of music on my elder brother's piano. After that I knew what I wanted to be: a songwriter!  At 16 I came across the progressive music of "The Alan Parsons Project", and it knocked me off my feet.  What I especially like about it is that that "APP" was the first studio-only musical formation and that Alan Parsons was co-writer of the songs as well the team's sound engineer.  I wanted to create the "APP of the 21st century".  At 40 it finally dawned on me that it was not going to happen.  When you bury the dream of your life at that age you have to make sure not to bury your happiness and your soul with it.  For true happiness, in my opinion is what this life is all about. 

 

 Head In The Clouds

The question that I should probably be asking myself is this: "How could I not see - over all these decades how I was steering my life further and further away from what I considered my true vocation - after graduating from law school, after doing a master of law and yet another master?"  I don' t ask myself this question, thank god.  Why?  Because I honestly believe that everything happens for a reason... 

 A Truly Revelatory Experience II

...that is why the fact that I've spent almost 30 years on that dream (and probably still am a dreamer actually) will never eat me up or even cause me tears.  My life has moved on, I found a wonderful partner for life who's made me more open to new things, be it food, music or, generally speaking, the planet.  Now I even like to listen to the controversial and boundary-testing "Phase 4" LP recordings of the 1960s and 1970s, where "interventionist" engineering techniques were applied to recordings of classical music in order to create a stereo sound that I would like to describe as "hyper-real".  Best listened to with headphones.    

 Treize

Even though I tried my best to make creative music (at a later point together with my wife) with original and yet listenable melodies, unexpected harmony changes, interesting lyrics, and all in all that certain right mix between repetition, familiarity, variation and previously unheard of combinations - elements that set a good song apart from a mediocre one -, I now come to the conclusion that my/our music would never have been what people are willing to pay for.  I have gambled with years of my lifetime and I will not repeat that mistake again.

 Karajan Squares The Circle

I quit making music in early 2011.  One thing I observed since then is that my collection of CDs with "classical" music, especially from the 20th century, has doubled.  Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Bartók, Heiller and Glass are my new Alan Parsons Project, Beatles, Jamiroquai and Steely Dan.  I am still wondering how this is to be interpreted but maybe I am just thinking too much anyway :-)

Q R You, Q Am I ?

So if I am a dreamer who has buried the dream of his life, what does that make me?

Surrealistic Vienna

The other day, after a private meeting right in the city center got cancelled on extremely short notice, I decided to head off on a little adventure.  Since I had my camera with me, I decided to make the best of the time "gained" and walked around, looking for interesting photo motifs.  After approximately four hours I had a 24 exposure cartridge full with photos twice.  240 (minutes) divided by 48 (pics) makes 5.

In other words: I took one photo every five minutes.  

There must be hundreds of people walking up or down these stairs at the Belvedere Palace every hour.  However I waited at least ten minutes until someone came along wearing clothes in strong colours :-)  The leaf of a tree, photographed in the morning of the same day, adds its strong green to the final result.  

The same stairs as above, another "long awaited woman in red" (this time with male company) and the subway station "Karlsplatz" juxtapose the hectic energy of a working day and the care-freeness of being on vacation.

 A fountain at the Lower Belvedere and again the subway station "Karlsplatz".

A tourist enjoys the October sun on one of the seats at the Belvedere, and two friends do just the same while sitting on the lawn in Stadtpark. 

Some modern sculpture which currently faces the Soviet War Memorial partly hides and reveals a photo of people sitting at the edge of the pond in the middle of Stadtpark. 


 

"She" (Women Part 1)

Listening Through The Lens

The other day I did something I never expected ever doing: asking a person I barely know whether she would be willing to sit through a photo session for me.  Luckily after explaining my experimental project, Daniela, a colleague at work agreed and when all other attendants had left the meeting room I rather quickly did three portraits of her close to the window against the sunlight.  I assume Daniela would have hoped for these pictures to get blended with something more interesting than just an analogue camera but I certainly did not (consciously) know this myself - for I try as much as I can not to "cheat" (as in not memorize the sequence of photos I took on that film) when it comes to Organic Random Photography.  And I must admit I like this picture, also because of the title my wife Nina came up with.

The Three-Dimensional Photograph #1

Believe it or not but the power utility I work for hosts exhibitions in what it calls the "Vertical Gallery".  Until a few days, it hosted some early works of Cindy Sherman.  Some of this famous artist's self-portraits got superimposed on the silhouettes of the shoes that Nina wore on the day of our civil wedding.  Because the eyes meander between the shoes in the foreground and the gallery in the background the photograph creates the illusion of 3D.

Like A Flower In Her Hair

These days I have my analogue camera with me almost all the time.  That came in quite handy when Christina and I were waiting for the fashionably late Claudia to join us for one of our regular breakfasts at a rather posh Viennese café close to work.  The psychedelic element was created by the "Visualizer" of i-Tunes on my MAC when playing the music of Rabih Abou Khalil. 

Beauty Is Kind And Gentle

A portrait of Elisabeth (taken on a sunny day in the canteen at work) got blended with the section about 'beauty' in Khalil Gibran' s book 'The Prophet'.

 Release Your Mind

Nina' s profile merges with a long exposure picture of the view we have from our apartment's "work room".    

Triple Word Score

When Keys Gallop

As pointed out in a previous blog post I felt like a "tourist in my own town" the other week when my brother, Nina and I were walking around in Vienna, stopping every now and then to take pictures of popular sights, e.g. the Imperial Spanish Riding School.  A pic from an information board there merged with a section of my laptop's illuminated keyboard, which looks quite cool in complete darkness.

Sta Y Foolish

One evening I decided to play Scrabble against myself and document it with my camera.  A few months ago, my parents gave me the game they themselves had bought in the Sixties, with letters still made of wood instead of plastic. After I had both lost and won against myself, I formed those words on the table which constituted the 1972 farewell message of "The Whole Earth Catalog".  That American counterculture catalog and this sentence in particular had had a big impact on Steve Jobs.  When I was on with my scrabble game, the "blank letter" was quicker at hand than the "Y", and the word "FOOLISH" is completely hidden by the leaves of a sunflower I photographed some other day.

Two "Theromcapsulary Dehousing Assisters" From The Scrabble Wars

When Nina and I met with a friend for some Irish breakfast, I took photos of his one year old son Max (below) as well as of available objects like salt and pepper shakers (above). In the subsequent superimposition with the Scrabble board, the shakers reminded me of R2D2, the famous robot droid from "Star Wars", whose terminus technicus makes for a somewhat cumbersome photo title.

Triple Word Score

Max, pictured outside an Irish pub, my parent's old Scrabble board and a game against myself during which - for some obscure reason - I formed the word "ENVY".

Aliens Of Our Past Attack!

 

The other week I decided to take things to a new level with ORP and tried it using a slide film (diapositiva). I later on deliberately had  it processed as if it was a negative film.  Such "cross-processing" normally results in very saturated colours and high contrasts, and since I was using colour filters when taking the pictures I was expecting strong tones to create new and strange colours as they blend into each other as a consequence of the multi-exposure.

Well, strong tones is what I was expecting. But if you chose to use some film you've never used before and apply chemicals it was not really made for, then you should be prepared for the unexpected. And so it happened: to my initial horror the cross-processed unknown film produced the complete opposite of what I originally wanted, namely almost monochrome pictures in shades of red and white. 

I believe that everything happens for a reason, and now that I look at these pictures vaguely two weeks after the "initial shock", I think that their "alien" tone in fact goes quite well with the messages the photos convey to me - and which I tried to translate into spoken language in the titles.       

 Aliens Of Our Past Attack

In my previous blog post I mentioned Cream's song "Those Were The Days". Apparently that tune had lingered on in my mind because a few days later, after Nina and I went hiking somewhere in Styria with my parents and my brother (all pictured above) I decided to experiment around with the cover of a special 4 CD set with all songs that Clapton, Bruce and Baker recorded together in the Sixties. I put one of the CDs on top of the cover so that only the face of a female with a somewhat weird facial expression was shown, and placed the light source and camera in a way that spectral colours would appear on the surface of the CD.

 ...and although spectral COLOURS are not precisely what I got, I at least got "spectral RED"  :-) 

 

  They Are Trying To Lock Away Nature From Us Humans 

Chilling at my parent' s place after the hike, I at one point lied on my back, put a coffee-house chair above my head and took pics looking up into the lamp. That merged with one of the several photos of skies and trees which I made during the hike.

 Like Trying To Catch A Falling Leaf

Walking around in Vienna with Nina a few days ago I picked up some leafs. When meditating on where and how to photograph them, I decided to go for Nina's suggestion and put them onto the stone floor of our kitchen and illuminate them with some strong light coming from one side.  The evening before I obviously had a photo shoot with my own fingers  :-)  These two pics superimpose another one of those pics from the hike in Styria.

 Aliens Of Our Past Disappear 

The woman's face from the aforementioned cover of the "Cream" recordings, encircled by one of the four CDs, shares the frame with what I believe are beams of light through blinders at my parents' house, and both blend with yet another sky picture taken in the South of Austria...   

 

Resealable Freshness ?

 Styrian skies and a box that contains rather popular potato chips together ask me a tough question. I do not have the answer - do you?

Ego Trips

 Those Were The Days 

The other day I took an old photo album from the shelf and made pictures of portraits that were taken of me in the seventies and eighties - sometimes (as in this case) I superimposed them using multiple exposure.   When I saw those two young Roberts blend with the eyes of Max, the one year old son of a close friend of mine, I instantly had to think of the Cream song that I chose for the photo title.

"Tie your painted shoes and dance

Blue daylight in your hair

Overhead a noiseless eagle fans a flame
Wonder everywhere."

  

 How To Build A Stronger Ego

My brother came to Vienna recently and we spent some time walking around taking pictures of buildings I get to see almost every day - like the "Haas Haus".   That made me feel (and possibly look) like a tourist in my own town.   A few days later Nina and I had a very brief photo shoot in our living room during which she took three portraits of me with some strong light coming from the bottom left.

I had no idea what to call this picture.  So I searched the web using the keywords "ego" and "building".   The very first search result became the photo title.

 Things Are Not What They Seem

This is another portrait of me taken by Nina during the same living room photo session as in "How To Build A Stronger Ego".  Nina asked me to do the "counter-intuitive" and keep the eye that is exposed to the light open while closing the one on the "dark side".   The other picture with the lampshades, wooden wall and family portrait was taken inside a typical Viennese Kaffeehaus while I was being a "tourist in my own city". 

When I was thinking of a suitable photo title, the first word that came to mind was the latin word "illuminatus".  I do not consider myself such, however decided to use that keyword for a search on the web.  I came across a trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.  The story meanders between thoughts, inner voices (both real and imagined) as well as through the past, present, and future.  This blog post surely enough meanders through my own past and present - and future?  :-)       

 

Montag WIENER SCHNITZEL MIT KARTOFFELSALAT Dienstag

If I ever was to consciously decide upon blending a seventies photograph of myself with the menu announcement outside a Viennese restaurant, I would surely position the white letters a bit more to the right of the picture.  But since thanks to coincidence - or whatever - this is how the picture turned out, I guess it is how it was meant to be :-)

Alternate Versions 1

Sometimes when I find an interesting photo motif I end up taking several pictures, albeit always with some tiny variations.  If such pics overlap with pics from yet another such "variations on a certain topic"-session, I every now and then as a result get a whole set of more or less similar multiple exposure photos.  So here are a few variations on previously published "images of the subconscious"  with some explanations as to how they came about.  

Floating Across A Recipe Book

Before Nina and I started our two week visit to Lebanon I decided to not come "unprepared".  So I spent several hours in our apartment listening to the music of Toufic Farroukh, Rabih Abou Khalil and Fairouz while taking pictures of things with a strong link to the country of the cedars: oriental CD covers, a can of Tahini or hommos, books like "Orientalism", "The Prophet" or cook books as this final product illustrates.

On one of our first days in Lebanon, my father-in-law took us to a lake in the mountains where we spotted some swans.  Of course it is one of the cheesiest photo motifs on earth, but apparently part of me likes "kitsch" :-)

Let' s Think

One sunday evening my mother-in-law, Nina, Bassam and I walked along Corniche seafront in Beirut and enjoyed a beautiful sunset (speaking of kitsch, hehe).  So I took portraits of the profiles of Bassam and Francoise against the fast descending source of light, in this photo, Francoise's elegantly accompanies the flight of stairs.

As mentioned in another post I needed to rush things to "fill my cartridges with content" when the end of our two weeks stay in Lebanon was drawing near.  One of these rushed pictures was a series of photos of stairs that had the words "LETS THINK POSITIVE" painted onto them.

The Return Of The Seaman

Again at the Corniche, this time I caught some guy walking around on the rocks by the sea.

One afternoon I spent about an hour walking around in Hamra with my camera, prepared to use colour filters for whatever I would "portrait".  Some stairs and a brick wall that fenced of some greenery were among those things and seem to nicely accompany the Seaman in the above collage.

When Worlds Collide

The same bricks as above in this photo share the frame with an image of the almost 40 year-old ruin of the Holiday Inn in downtown Beirut, as seen through a side street.