These interview scenes are unused scenes from the documentary about Jock Sturges (not included in the DVD)

Interview with Jock Sturges (Quicktime-Video)

Deutsche Version

Official Filmwebsite (Trailer, Gallery, DVD, 99 minutes)

Jock Sturges and beauty
In the summer of 2007, we travelled to the French Atlantic Coast to meet an artist whose images stand out from the diverse pool of contemporary photography. His subject matter is the human being. His tool is a large format camera. His goal is the depiction of nothing less than beauty.

He demands the truth from his photographs. For over 30 years, the American photographer Jock Sturges has dealt with beauty and truth, an idea of art, unfortunately, which is often scorned today. In order to recognize and appreciate that, which distinguishes his work, we must focus on the definition of beauty.

Jock Sturges. Nikki. Montalivet. France. 1996.

Beauty is first and foremost an abstract definition, a concept, difficult to determine. It has always been governed by history and culture. However, there is a certain degree of global consensus concerning to the notion of beauty. Not only do we define physical matter, such as humans, animals, plants or objects as beautiful, but also abstractions, such as ideas or the notion of the soul. Even Schiller in his essay Weiterlesen… »

Interview with Hellen van Meene (Quicktime-Video)

Deutsche Version (Interview Sender in deutscher Sprache) 

Hellen van Meene, a global photographer.

Not everyone finds access to poetry. Sensual beauty appears useless to some of us. In times of controllers man is reduced to his function.

As man is a creature that reaches beyond his plain function in the society, he has – among other things – created art. Art is one of the highest achievements of mankind and describes ever again the core which represents humanity.

Photo by Hellen van Meene.

In the images of the dutch photographer Hellen van Meene fragility, beauty Weiterlesen… »

Interview: James Nachtwey (Quicktime-Video)

James Nachtwey : war photographer

It is said that as a war photographer, you either become cynical or holy. If there are indeed only these two ways of existing as a war photographer, James Nachtwey belongs to the holy. Nachtwey, a tall and elegant man, appears within the terror which he photographs as if he is surrounded by an aura of being untouchable. He has been everywhere where there have been wars and atrocities have been committed during the last decades: Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kosovo, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq and many other countries. But of course, he is not untouchable at all. Serveral times he has been severely injured or illnesses have torn him down. Nevertheless he continues working because of his strong belief that his pictures can make a difference. Nachtwey, convinced of the effect his pictures have on viewers, has never stopped hoping to fight war, hunger and poverty with his work.

What Nachtwey has seen can hardly be described. It is bare horror. And his pictures convey only a part of it, because a picture can not reproduce the sound of a machine gun and the stink of a rotting corpse. These pictures, though, are so strong and overwhelming that they burn into the mind of the beholder. And that is what Nachtwey wants. Nobody should forget the atrocities going on in the world every day, and everybody should — according to his abilities — do something about them: a sublime ideal and a powerful motivation.

James Nachtwey. Chechnya. 1996. Ruins in the center of Grozny.

Weiterlesen… »

Interview with Carla van de Puttelaar (Quicktime-Video) 

A new star on the sky: we have met the photographer Carla van de Puttelaar in Amsterdam. Her passion are women and beauty; or rather the beauty of women. Her models are not for the cover of the high gloss magazines for they are not perfect. Their “stain” is what Carla van de Puttelaar defines as beauty: a very human beauty. A beauty with dignity.

Carla van de Puttelaar. Untitled. 2006. C-print. Weiterlesen… »