Civil War #moviereview

Kirsten Dunst as Lee Smith (Copyright A24)

Civil War is a weird film. As a photographer, and film photographer no less, I was thrilled to see someone shooting analogue in what's ostensibly a potential depiction of a parallel reality to today's America. As unlikely as it is, however, that Jessie, played in a really bland way by Cailee Spaeny, would actually have used two Nikon FE-2 rather than some digital camera, it's still nice to see that #filmlives. Because it does. On that note, it's incredibly strange that the Sony cameras evidently used by Kirsten Dunst's character Lee Smith have the logo blacked out, a fate the analogue Nikons don't suffer. That is even stranger since Sony very likely had to pay quite a bit to have their equipment feature so prominently in the film.

And speaking of weird things, it's strange that the story is so "flat". It shows, in a quite poorly edited way, what's basically a roadtrip marred by a few terribly bad choices by Jessie, which result in several people getting killed, including Dunst's character. Her name is evidently based on Lee Miller. Not that this is left for the audience to figure out; Jessie states that Lee has the same name as her hero, which is as a matter of script writing isn’t necessary. If the point with the film were to show a strong female lead in a war zone photographer kind of way, well then just do that, Mr Garland. There's no need to copy the distinct name of a well-known photographer. Your audience is not stupid.

So Jessie, who is basically just a scared dove, is portrayed as someone who is undergoing a sort of baptism of fire during the roadtrip through broken America on the way to the White House with her band of Press people to hopefully clinch an interview with the beleaguered president. And as she gets braver she starts behaving truly stupidly, which results in at least three colleagues getting shot, including, as noted, Dunst's character who dies trying – really unnecessarily – to save Jessie from getting shot, a fate which would probably have been better, all things considered, for photojournalism as a whole.

Of course that had to happen. It's such a silly cliché that it could not not happen. For the longest time during the movie one wonders who will pay with their life, given the general level of hostility that surrounds them. But honestly, I had expected more from Garland; why not surprise us and not have anyone killed. Even letting the young novice die – another cliché – would have been better because it would have played well with the doubts that Dunst’s character shows with respect to her chosen career and the damage it has done to her soul. Now that would have added depth to this shallow piece. Garland only includes clips of previous situations where Dunst’s character has more or less blankly registered horrible things, but does not let her really act out the effects that her working life has had on her. It is only alluded to towards the very end. Still, it is perfectly possible to build character depth with very, very little film-making. See for instance the excellent film The Mule, by Clint Eastwood. Little clips here and there, short phrases of dialogue and well executed editing in that movie gives the viewer a distinctly better ‘feel’ for the characters involved, even in supporting roles, than what Garland manages to do over the course of 109 minutes of runtime for four persons who are more or less stuck in a vehicle most of the time.

I had also expected more with respect to the film as a whole, it’s purpose. The film evidently tries to surf the wave of possible realities that stem from the insurrection against Biden's lawful win of the presidency a few years back, trying as it does so to show how fragile is the social fabric that binds a society together. That fabric is really the centre of gravity of a nation, it's what makes it whole, complete. And once it has been shaken to the core it will unravel in a disturbingly swift way and cannot easily be re-established, and most certainly not without significant bloodshed. The price of freedom is after all paid in blood, and it is considerably cheaper to maintain freedom well.

But Garland misses the opportunity to make the point, any point actually. He shows the youthfully stupid mistakes of Jessie against the backdrop of the raging civil unrest. But he doesn't even take a view on how that unrest should be dealt with or whether it is intrinsically “good” or “bad”. He doesn’t even bother to explain the different factions’ reasons for fighting. Instead he opts only for the dispassionate view of the proceedings that might be seen by the photojournalist's lens. But a lens is never objective, it is always aimed, it always ought to have a purpose. Yet it seems that the lens Garland used for this movie didn’t.

Is it right to do so? I think not. But the more important question is why Garland did not think it important enough to show anything more than only that. Since the hostilities, without further explanation by Garland, are necessarily seen against the backdrop of recent US history, the result is an impression that he would be equally OK with violence resulting from insurrectionist movements against a lawful government as with the attempts by that government to quell the unlawful unrest. This is no small matter because it may be applied to other larger, and current, conflicts, such as Russia’s unforgivable continuing attack on Ukraine under Vladimir Putin’s leadership. The lack of clarity as to right and wrong in the movie appears to imply that Garland does not mind that aggressors are let into the highest levels of government or international governance, such as the UN Security Council. Not taking a position, if even only obliquely, is tantamount to looking the other way, to not standing up for the important foundations of society, to cowardice, even.

The film therefore feels like a missed chance to actually make a point. Well, beyond the one that an ignorant scared young woman, who wants to be like a photographer who died almost five decades ago, through recklessness puts other people in jeopardy and ends up living due to the selfless sacrifice of an experienced woman who saw the lurking danger which eluded the idiot youth who got to live on. If you read disappointment between the lines you’re correct.

The Tribunal: Some technical aspects

My most recent project – The Tribunal – recently went live. It is a project with which I have worked for quite a long time, several years in fact, and which means a lot to me personally.

The project arose out of curiosity as much as of necessity.

While the ICTY began to be “downsized”, as it is so beautifully called in management speak, and its premises on Churchillplein 1 in The Hague bit by bit were being repurposed, I wondered what it would look like if photographed. As I wandered the corridors during the last few years of the ICTY’s existence I started thinking about the institution as a photographer, and not as someone who was only working there.

I’m quite sure other photographers know precisely what I mean by that. There are times when one keeps looking at the light, paying attention to details, obstacles, angles, stories to be told. And there are other times when one doesn’t. At my ordinary place of work, I would not normally see like I otherwise do. In fact, it’s probably the only place I don’t observe my surroundings in that way.

A crucial question soon arose which needed to be resolved to make the project happen – how to get permission to photograph. It was a United Nations institution, after all. It turned out that I needn’t have worried. From the start my idea was met with interest from the three principals of the institution, President Carmel Agius, Prosecutor Serge Brammertz and Registrar John Hocking. The same interest was shown by the many heads of section whose support was crucial for me to gain access to areas that were off limits even for most who worked at the institution.

As I continued to spend time in the building I consciously and purposefully analysed the areas I went to – offices, the courtrooms, meeting rooms, even the lavatories and the basement – from the perspective of how would I photograph them. Obvious things like lens and film choices were part of this intellectual exercise, but also more complex and intangibly artistic things, like where should or could I put my tripod and how should I expose the film and focus the lens in order to give the viewer the feeling of actually being at a particular location.

This – presence – has been my goal all along.

The ICTY, like several other similar ad hoc international or internationalised jurisdictions, was finite from day it was born in 1993. It had a set, if at that time unknown, lifespan much like every living thing on this planet. It was never meant to deal with all the war criminals in the Balkans, but only with the most senior accused responsible for the most serious crimes. By default, a heavy burden was always meant to rest on national legal systems in addressing the thousands of persons who committed horrible crimes during the conflicts.

I saw this time-limited aspect of the Tribunal’s existence as a major reason to preserve it for posterity. This is one of the most powerful aspects of photography, in my view. It is a way to literally and visually travel in time, to relive past events. Connected with this is the possibility to give the viewer the feeling of being present inside the frame. Naturally, it depends on what has been photographed and how this was done. A glossy fashion photo, for instance, rarely invites viewers to feel as if they’re “there” on-site. Quite the opposite, actually. Fashion photography seems to actively try to keep the viewer outside and away, much in the same way that certain types of authoritarian photography have been used by less benevolent regimes to distance the leadership from the populace.

Ansel Adams’s supposedly quipped that “'there are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer’. An image can be understood or interpreted, felt even, very differently by the viewer when compared to what the photographer meant. In my view Adams kicked in an open door, but he also alludes to another dimension of the photograph as an interface between the photographer and the viewer, between the vision and the viewed. An image can bring the viewer along for the ride. Some of Adams’s own landscape works achieve this, especially his more intimate photographs of the natural world. To the contrary, at least in my opinion as one of the two people he referred to, his large scale landscapes scenes lack that immediacy. When I see Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite, I feel like I am outside the frame looking in, mouth agape naturally, rather than being there in front of this mesmerising scene. I do not feel like I am part of that scene.

As part of the preservation effort, which this project seeks to achieve, it was important to me that the viewer would feel present in the spaces I photographed. I wanted these spaces to speak unhindered back to the viewer, and I wanted each viewer to feel something in return, as if the viewer had stood where I put the camera. To attempt to realise this vision I chose to photograph the project on medium format film (Kodak Ektar 100 to be precise) bar a handful of shots which are cropped 35mm film. I opted for the square format because in my view that better resembles the human vision; we do not see rectangularly. I also opted for a 40mm lens, which gives a very wide field of view. In some confined locations the choice of lens was due to sheer necessity to be able to get a useable photo. But in most locations this choice meant placing the camera quite close to what I wanted to photograph because otherwise everything would have looked too small. To further strengthen the feeling of presence virtually all scenes are photographed with the camera ca. 150cm above the ground. It is my hope that this will give viewers, regardless of their individual height, a feeling of observing the details of a scene as if they had stood where the camera was placed.

It will be for others to tell if the photos achieve this, of course.

A walk through some bloody history

I thought it could be fun to show three historically connected photographs from Gamla Stan, or the Old Town, of Stockholm.

Beginning in 1397, Sweden (including parts of today’s Finland), Norway and Denmark were joined in a union called the Kalmar Union after the Swedish city in which the first joint (Danish) king was crowned. The Union was principally established to prevent further German expansion north into the Baltic area through the Hanseatic League and was strongly favoured by the Danes. The Union’s main difficulty was to actually remain unified. While there was a common monarch directing domestic and foreign policy, each country remained a sovereign state with its own laws. With time, the Norwegian and Swedish nobility were not keen on remaining in the Union and tried to leave it several times.

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In the beginning of the 16th century Sweden was at war with Denmark after a messy several decades where Sweden had been at war with Russia, rebellious Swedes belonging to the Sture Party had pulled Sweden out of the Union and even occupied the Stockholm castle Tre Kronor (‘Three Crowns’). Due to the deaths of various key individuals the situation changed significantly towards 1520. The palace occupation ended and in November that year king Christian II of Denmark was crowned Union king in Stockholm.

The photograph above shows Stortorget, or Big Square, which is centrally located on the Old Town island. It's rather pretty with those colourful buildings that look like the result of a tryst between an Amsterdam huisje and a Nyhavn townhouse. But looks can be deceiving. It was on this spot between 7-9 November 1520 that Christian II – having first duly celebrated his coronation for three days and granted amnesty to members of the Sture Party – ordered the execution of upwards 100 Union opponents and their servants. He even went as far as ordering the exhumation of the recently-deceased leader of the Sture Party to be able to throw his body on the fire with the bodies of those just executed.

At this event – infamously known as the Stockholm Bloodbath – the father and several relatives of Swedish noble Gustav Vasa were executed. This galvanised Vasa, who was already one of several rebel leaders, to begin a war of liberation against Christian the Tyrant, as he henceforth became known in Sweden.

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The above photograph shows Riddarhuset, or the House of Nobility (literally the House of Knights), which is a stone’s throw from the Riddarholmen Church in the previous post. In front stands a statue of Gustav Vasa. After the Stockholm Bloodbath he went to the Dalarna region in western Sweden to assemble an army and drum up support. After a series of local rebellions and successful battles against Danish forces in Sweden, Vasa was elected king on 6 June 1523 in the city of Strängnäs, which is one of the reasons that date is celebrated as the Swedish national day. On Midsummer’s Eve 23 June 1523 Gustav Vasa victoriously entered Stockholm.

The successful rebellion against Christian the Tyrant led to him being very disliked in Denmark, too. Furthermore, because he had killed several bishops in the Bloodbath also the Catholic Church in Rome was extremely displeased with him. As a consequence, Christian left Denmark and ended up in the Netherlands.

Gustav Vasa took up residence at the Tre Kronor castle in Stockholm. As a king, he was quite ruthless against various domestic uprisings, and he also raised taxes, cut the ties with the Catholic Church and nationalised its assets.

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The above photo was taken on the square in front of the Riddarholmen Church. It shows the Wrangel Palace which since 1756 houses the Svea Court of Appeal. There's are a few Gustav Vasa links here, too. For instance, the palace’s southern tower used to form part of Vasa's defence fortifications in Stockholm.

The Wrangel palace served as royal residence for 50 years after Tre Kronor burnt down in 1697. At the time of its destruction that palace was around 400 years old. It had been constructed from wood and copper and the fire spread quickly. Today’s royal palace is built where the old palace was located.

A final point on Gustav Vasa. He changed the Swedish monarchy from an elective monarchy to a hereditary monarchy under the House of Vasa. This house ruled Sweden until 1654 when his descendant Queen Christina abdicated, converted to Catholicism and emigrated to Rome. As mentioned in the previous post, she is not buried in the Riddarholmen Church, but rests in the Vatican Grotto. The sole heir of the House of Vasa after her abdication was John II Casimir Vasa of Poland, and with his death 1672 the House of Vasa became extinct. No Vasa descendant therefore lived in the Wrangel palace.

The Riddarholmen church

In the evening and at night the world looks so different compared to daytime. I very much enjoy exploring cities then. The below photo is from a nightly walkabout last autumn when I spent two weeks in Stockholm. 

The church is the Riddarholmen church in central Stockholm. This is Stockholm’s oldest building. The church was constructed in the late 13th century as a church for the Catholic grey friars. Some of the original walls still remain above ground. In the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation the church became part of the Church of Sweden. It is most known for being the church where all Swedish monarchs since 1632 are buried, with the exception of Queen Christina who is buried in St Peter's in Rome.

I have always liked the cool neo-gothic black cast iron spire which was attached after the old spire burnt down in 1835 due to a lightning strike. During the ensuing fire the bells fell down which must have resulted in one very loud bang.

I used Kodak Ektar 100 which handles longer exposures like a champ. The square where the church is located is not big enough to enable using the rise on the PC Mutar to line up the verticals. Hence this dramatic down-up perspective.

The Riddarholmen Church | Flickr

La Camargue

I have just added these two images of flamingos to my Wildlife gallery. And I have added a new gallery for Landscapes which I will be expanding.

The photos were shot last year in the Camargue nature reserve in the south of France. A pretty mesmerising place to photograph in and one I hope I can return to some day. The hazy and blisteringly hot sun resulted in somewhat muted colours on two of the images which were shot with the sun off to the side. On the close-up image of the birds I had the sun in my back, which gave deeper, vivid colours. The camera was the Hasselblad 203FE with the 80 Planar FE and the film, the ever-reliable Kodak Ektar 100.

Another museum visit — Erwin Olaf

This time last year the Kunstmuseum and the Fotomuseum here in The Hague hosted a large joint exhibition of Erwin Olaf’s work. I have a decades-long fascination with how people behave at exhibitions and I can’t help but bring a camera along whenever I go to one. It seems that the visitors unwittingly become part of the exhibition and that I, observing them observing the art through my camera, in some ‘meta’ way become removed from the spectacle. In a way, there are two parallel exhibitions, one displayed on the museum’s walls and one taking place in the exhibition space itself.

As for this particular exhibition I can’t say that I liked it very much, simply because I didn’t understand what he’s trying to say. The quote which the Kunstmuseum used in its marketing of the exhibition was this:

What I want to show most of all is a perfect world with a crack in it. I want to make the picture seductive enough to draw people into the narrative, and then deal the blow.

Honestly not a very nice thing at all to say. I mean, who wants to be dealt a blow?

But the main problem was that I didn’t see the narrative of which the quote speaks. To my (admittedly possibly somewhat dim) mind, it seems provocation is the end he’s reaching for time and time again, and it quickly got tedious. I did notice a softening of this striving for provocation over the course of his career, which I suspect is normal. One can’t be an enfant terrible one’s whole life. But even his arranged slightly eery portraits shot in the last ten years fail to show a compelling narrative, as competently executed as they are technically speaking.

Then we have the photos he was commissioned by the Dutch royal court to shoot. Oh my, where do I begin? They are a mix of corporate photography, Martin Schoeller’s Close Up and wedding photography. The one where they are walking towards the camera with…wait for it…wind in their hair is worthy of the Eurovision Song Contest. Not quite regal. In fact, all of the photographs, even those where the king and queen pose, lack the weight and presence required for this type of photography. Some may argue that monarchy is such an antiquated institution that it must be popularised if it is to remain relevant. That may be the case but there are monarchies which manage to maintain a balance, in terms of their photographic image, between being for the people and being of the people. The British and Swedish monarchies spring to mind here. This, I feel, was not achieved at all by Olaf’s series.

Shot with Leica M6TTL and the under-rated Leica 50 Summicron v. 3 on Fuji Pro 160S.

Black Metal Minox

I was recently in Oberhausen, Germany, to see Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir and brought my Minox 35GT loaded with Ilford XP2. Norwegian DImmu Borgir’s excellent main act was preceded by equally excellent Amorphis from Finland. And Amorphis, in turn, was preceded by a more recently established band with the evocative name Wolves in the Throne Room that was also very good (incidentally, Amorphis was founded in 1990 and Dimmu Borgir in 1993).

I only quite recently began listening to various sorts of black metal. It is a completely logical extension of my musical taste which I usually define as “good music”. So if something catches my, well, ear and it happens to be symphonic black metal, well then so be it; I will listen to it. It is fun music to listen to, too, and more melodious (at times) than one might at first think. Plus, much like certain types of techno music, it’s great to have in your ears in order to focus on a particular task, like writing (in fact, I’m listening to Sceptic Flesh’s excellent Portrait of a Headless Man right now).

I chose the Minox 35GT because it’s a very small (10cm wide, 6cm tall and 3cm deep) and light (200g) camera. It is also made of a very sturdy plastic material and features a drawbridge cover over the lens, all of which I though could come in handy at a black metal concert. It is an aperture-priority camera with manual focus so I simply set it to f/2.8 and infinity and exposed the film at EI800. Since most of the shots would be heavily backlit I sometimes activated the 2x function, which doubles the shutter speed.

Point. And. Shoot. It doesn't get simpler than that.

Since the Minox has a 35mm lens I needed to be fairly close to the action, so at the risk of incurring the wrath of shorter black metal fans I moved as close as I could to the stage. The film was developed in HC-110(B) as described in a previous post and scanned on my Coolscan 9000.

Sniper Alley

I lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina at the turn of the century for two and a half years. It was truly a fascinating time to be there when that country, and in fact the whole of the Balkans, seemed to come to life again. During the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, Sarajevo was besieged by the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Army of Republika Sprska from positions on the several hills surrounding the city.

The Zmaja od Bosne (Dragon of Bosnia) is a long wide avenue that leads into Sarajevo. There are many tall buildings along this avenue which Bosnian-Serb/Serb snipers used for cover during the siege, including in order to shoot civilians. This gave the avenue its infamous nickname, Sniper Alley. It begins around where this building stands, the Executive Council building of the parliament, which was shelled in 1992 by artillery fire from the Bosnian-Serb/Serb positions. For this photo I used my trusty Canon EOS 1N, the 35-70mm kit zoom and Agfa APX 400.

Zmaja od Bosne (Dragon of Bosnia) aka Sniper Alley | Flickr

Ilford XP2 at the Mauritshuis

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague is wonderful because it is small. All too often museums are too big. Think of the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Rijksmuseum or the Vatican museum, to name a few. They are enormous and they are meant to be enormous being central showcases of the arts on a national level. But from a visitor’s perspective, such museums are daunting, intimidating even. Personally I get less out of a visit to such a treasure trove than from smaller museums with more focused collections.

The Mauritshuis is located in the former home of count (and later prince) Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, who at one point was governor of Dutch Brazil and therefore nicknamed “The Brazilian”. I suspect today’s meaning of that term wasn’t contemplated in those days. The building was completed in 1641 in and has housed the museum since 1822.

The Mauritshuis is not only wonderful because it is small, but also because it is, actually, quite vast. Let me explain. The building isn’t very large. One can easily walk through the halls in an hour or two and see ‘everything’. But the fact that it is a small museum means that one more easily takes the time to appreciate the art on display because there is no rush to finish everything, to hurry to the next wing or such. And even though there aren’t hall upon hall of massive oil paintings or never-ending galleries of statues, there is so much to see in the paintings themselves. I don’t know how many times I have been there over the years but it is a lot and each time I find new details in paintings I thought I “knew”. I should say that there are also separate exhibitions in addition to the standing exhibition.

Anyway, all that to say that it’s a museum well worth visiting.

During my most recent visit I brought my trusty Leica M4 with that Jack of all trades of a lens the 50 Summicron and a roll of Ilford XP2 Super. This is an amazing film, imho. Ilford markets it as an ‘ISO 400 fine-grained highly versatile film that can be processed on the high street in C41 chemistry’. And yes that is right, XP2 is a chromogenic film which is meant to be processed as normal colour negative films are, in C41 chemistry. This was pretty revolutionary when Ilford launched its predecessor XP1 and other brands followed suit, for instance Kodak with its BW400CN.

XP2 is amazing also from the perspective that a single roll can be shot at EI50 through EI800 and processed in standard C41 chemistry without any additional development needed. Sounds like having a digital camera in a film roll, no?

But what is really cool about XP2 is that it can be developed in normal black and white chemistry. There is some information about this on the interwebs - in particular this article at Ilford Photo written by eminent photographer Chris Moss. Having tried, this is the only way I develop my XP2 these days. The results in Kodak HC-110 dilution E are sublime, both with 135 and 120 film, with very fine grain and excellent negatives that scan easily. The results in Diafine are not bad at all either and as always that developer is great where one has shot a single roll at varying EI. As is noted in the article at Ilford’s site, 135 film can be shot up to EI800 without ill effects grains-wise whereas 120 film can go up to EI1600 with smooth results.

There is another benefit with this film which is that, provided it has been processed in C41 chemistry, the dust removal feature Digital ICE will work. This is a massive benefit because it saves a lot of time during post-processing. If the film is developed in black and white chemistry that function will not work because there will still remain silver halide particles in the emulsion since no bleach fix has been used during development.

Ilford XP2 Super can also be bought in 30,5m bulk rolls. Even though a single roll of 135 film is not extremely costly by today’s standards, bulk loading will bring down the cost per roll by some 30%.

New Rustavi

This panorama shows New Rustavi which lies half an hour south-east of Tbilisi in Georgia. Rustavi is an ancient settlement that dates to around 500-400 BC, but the new part was built in the 1940s by German POWs on the orders of that infamous Georgian Josef Stalin. This was done to provide housing to thousands upon thousands of workers used in the many iron and steelworks in and around Tbilisi. New Rustavi is dominated by wide avenues along which literally hundreds of more or less colourful brutalist Soviet-style apartment blocks stretch for kilometers. After the fall of the iron curtain things haven’t gone so well and the area is today very poor.

In the foreground is a place selling used cars. There are a few men kicking the tyres in the lower right-hand corner. Just around the corner is another used car lot, Autopapa which is a massive parking lot full of cars from all over the world (it is visible from very high up in the sky).

On the roads in and around Tbilisi there are both left-hand drive cars and right-hand drive cars. It's very weird but apparently a result of the fact that cars, and often cars which have had accidents, are sold to other, cheaper markets, such as Georgia to be repaired and soled anew. There are many vehicles with collision damages, many of which are adorned by for instance English, French, German and Dutch company, like small Dutch dry cleaners for instance.

I shot this picture with the sublime 80 Planar FE which was coupled with the Hasselblad 2XE converter to make exposure a point and shoot operation. It's on Kodak Ektar and the fine grain really helps with the details (here's the large scan which even shows billboards and signs in the far distance, in addition to all the number plates. It is easy to stitch a panorama in Photoshop. The key thing to do is to colour-balance the component images first, which is dead simple with the eye-dropper tool.

New Rustavi | Flickr

Spotted at the Galleria

The Galleria is a hyper-modern shopping centre in the middle of Tbilisi. It was apparently developed for something like 90 million USD. It is shiny, polished and full of pretty much the same shops that are found everywhere these days. It also has a really modern multiplex cinema, but unfortunately when I went the audience didn't respect even one of the rules in the Wittertainment Code of Conduct. Luckily the film was Venom, so I didn't miss much, haha.

The place is littered with serious-looking gentlemen without necks wearing black suits. These security guards weren't thrilled that I took a few pictures, like the guy down in the right-hand corner on the first image, but one only needs fractions of a second to take a shot :)

The second photo in the gallery is the view from the outside. Both were shot with the Hasselblad 203FE and the 40mm Distagon on Kodak Ektar 100.

Old funicular station off Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi

I have twice visited the wonderful Fotografia gallery in Tbilisi, both during the autumn of 2018 and during the spring of 2019  (well worth a visit, also online). While there, I saw some shots (like this one) taken in a really interesting location, in what looked like an oval building with stairs on all sides snaking themselves up to something above. The structure looked quite large, but when I found the building (by chance actually) I was surprised to see that it is actually quite small. There was no entrance so I had to squeeze in through broken windows near the ground and crawl on the floor among dust and debris.

This an old funicular station built in 1905 in the yard of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences just off one of the main avenues in Tbilisi, Rustaveli Avenue. 

The station was built to connect the centre of Tbilisi with the "upper" Tbilisi which is on the mountain side surrounding the city. The station isn't operational and hasn't been for quite some time, but apparently there is a plan to restore the building and the funicular too. Reading this I was happy that I got to go there before it becomes all nice and shiny again. There is graffiti everywhere and some of it is quite good, I think. Very colourful and a bit bizarre, which adds to the atmosphere a lot. It would have been very different had the structure only looked old and dilapidated.

The photos above were shot with my Hasselblad 203FE using the Carl Zeiss Distagon 40 CFE and the PC Mutar 1.4x shift converter. The film is the always excellent Kodak Ektar 100.

Going to the movies in Pristina

This is the Kino ABC cinema in Pristina, Kosovo. I visited this very nice cinema in November 2017 and watched Kenneth Branagh's take on the Murder on the Orient Express together with 19 other guests, all very well behaved and fully compliant with the Wittertainment Code of Conduct.

To be honest, the film wasn't very good and and I found that this new version didn't really add anything at all to the story. But then again I've never found the story compelling; it has always seemed much too farfetched that the villain, who wronged so many people in such a bad way, would not have just left the train at the first possible station having seen that those very individuals are on the train. It's a massive movie twist that's too unrealistic to be any good.

The movie was projected in English with Kosovo Albanian subtitles superimposed in a slightly greenish field at the bottom of the screen. Coming from Sweden where we subtitle rather than dub, I didn't mind this at all, but it became hilarious when, after a short while, the subtitles became completely out-of-sync with the on-screen dialogue. And then, halfway through the film, the subtitles ceased all together.

I had brought my camera to the cinema in the hope that I might be able to photograph the location after the film. So afterwards I spoke with Feid, the friendly usher/projectionist/janitor, who kindly agreed to let me photograph. He was unhappy about the multiplexes – there's at least one in Pristina – which, he said, "destroy for real cinemas". I shot the above photograph in the theatre, leaning the camera on one of the seats because I hadn't brought my travel tripod.

The first image shows the theatre itself. The following three show the cinema's entrance, the ticket booth and the entrance to the theatre. As you can see, I used different films. The first two are on expired Kodak Portra 400VC which I exposed at EI100 (I typically expose all my colour negative films 1-2 stops over). The first and third ones were shot on Fuji Provia 400X (also expired, exposed at box speed).

The cinema also has a bar and lounge area. As I didn't have my tripod, I shuffled around one of those tall bar tables one stands around. The projectionist Feid was very understanding, which helped a lot since, as you can see above, I shot these photos fairly late and he probably just wanted to call it a night. Images four and five are on Kodak Portra 400VC and the sixth is on Fuji Provia 400X. The final photo shows the outside of the cinema and its surroundings.

For all photos I used my Hasselblad 203FE in aperture priority mode with the Hasselblad Carl Zeiss 40mm Distagon f/4 CFE.