My Grandmother wrote stories, poetry and she always read books, lots of them. So, for me all this was quite normal. Here a portrait of her I made when I was 16 years old.Meta Kintzel 1958
My first major publication work were my photos for our matric booklet 1961 in Frankfurt/Main. It was a tough ask as a 'Middle year' booklet 3 years earlier was illustrated by one of the greatest cartoonist I ever knew - who later 'only' became a teacher. I included this work too as it was just sooo good.
I chose photo montage to get our messages across. The technical difficulties were huge as I only had a rangefinder camera which I focussed with open body+shutter and greased paper, then replace that with 35mm filmsnippets in total darkness without moving the camera, using a magnifying glass for a close-up lens. Then develop each film snippet separately. I must have been mad or desperate, well, I was young - isn't that the same? BEAUTIFUL PORT LINCOLN was the first major publication in our new home country. There was an ad in the AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY magazine and I responded. We got the project outline from Sydney and started to zig zag our new hometown Port Lincoln and the rest of Eyre Peninsula. I am sure the love and admiration we felt still comes across in Ally's essays and my shots. Encouraged by our friends the Trevor family and the Elliot newsagency we put an album together which left all others, including the one of ADELAIDE done by pro photographers, behind. Have a look and decide for yourself: Do we achieve the goal to encourage people to visit that corner of the world or has it become historic in those 23 years sice compilation? http://www.scribd.com/doc/38155443/Beautiful-Port-Lincoln
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The first school magazine is from 1959, what we used to call Middle School degree. View or download here:
In 1959 we had Blacha, a natural cartoonist genius in our class and I stood well back, just contributed a bit with the writing. If I remember correctly he had to repeat a year, so, when it came to the big school finish paper we had no illustrator. I was in the committee and suddenly everyone looked to me to come up with the visuals: You have a camera, come up with something! For a few days I was scared stiff, then I remembered photo-montage and the wonderful DaDa movement of the generation before. Then I got cracking. Nobody of us had a reflex camera for safe closeups. What I did was mad, but it worked: I stuck a magnifying glass my Grannie used for reading to the front lense of my trusty old rangefinder camera. Put the shutter on T and opened it on a tripod, put .......this is getting to long now. Today we call these methods Russian Patent. I promise I'll write an essay about how we did things then, it was quite mad, but I got the results. Have a look first and discover why in Photoshop we talk about cut and paste - we did just that using real glue to stick it all on. Here is the result: http://www.scribd.com/doc/37466461/Carl-Schurz-Schule-Frankfurt-Abiturientenmagazin-1961
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