Arne Weidemann Photography
Travel | Street | PEOPLE | Story | Wildlife | Landscape | Aerial
Just like life itself this page is very much work in progress – new images from often visited or for the first time explored places added, stories extended or retold, old treasures from long ago trips unearthed …
Unlike life itself, though, chronology is broken up, time condensed into places (i.e. countries, cities) rather than following the order of events (i.e. journeys). That is the great wonder of human memory as well as its materialization in the form of photography – slivers of space-time as traces of action potential (as Boesch would have it) that can be arranged and rearranged as part of the ever ongoing process of meaning making (as Bruner might have called it).
Thus experience is transformed into narratives represented here in the form of series of images from one or more journeys. But occasionally a single image is less part of a coherent story than more of a symbol for events or moments that I found meaningful – or which I filled with meaning by seeing certain things together in a given moment that thus became decisive (if that was what Cartier-Bresson meant with this term).
Anyway, explore and enjoy! And if you do, I am looking forward to your comments!
Places and Stories
Although I strive for each single photo to tell a story, …
… a story is sometimes better told by more than one – or even by many – pictures. Sometimes it is a single image that triggers my interest in a topic or theme, and over time a collection of images evolves that together create a more complex view of the story. Sometimes an event I witness needs several photos to capture its different facets. And sometimes – as with travel stories – it is a string of events that evolve over time and of images that come into view en route.
So feel invited to discover photos stories between all the collections. The photo stories follow a more narrative structure with the accompanying text adding an additional layer to the story rather than being an only explanatory subtext. Vice versa the images are not – of course – meant to merely illustrate the text.
About me
Taking photos for me is a way of doing life, a way of being in the world – the photographing act (thanks for the term, Alex Gillespie) being as important as the resulting images – and oftentimes even more.
While walking about I capture what catches my interest, creating personal mementos of what at this moment appears meaningful to me.
The looking-at-photos act, as well as the post-processing act, lead to further acts of meaning making (Bruner).
Like haikus, the photographs I take do not attempt to reason or explain anything. To me they rather resonate in a meaning space that goes beyond the visual frame. Looking becomes seeing when I contemplate the connotational links that might take their start in just one aspect of the picture – be it color, pattern, form, an object or a face – which become meaningfully linked to other aspects of or details within the picture, to memories of the situation when it was made, and to whatever comes to mind…