(I must say at first sight, I thought it was Panos during one of his off moments…. No kidding!)

You know what this reminded me of. You know when you see a caged animal, in a circus, thats been there for too long and you , as a human being, can recognize that sense of lost hope in its eyes.

yes :) .. I’ll be next week Monday – Wednesday in Athens .. (hopefully meeting Panos)
Easter, I’ll be in France seeing my sister, and have vacation until April 21st.
There should be an opportunity to meet. :)

http://www.lightstalkers.org/posts/whats-the-name-of-the-photographer-who

EVA
my website needs some serious working on it. :)
Sorry for making you chase the rabbit.

You are respected and more..you are beloved..welcome back..and Gracie, you too…welcome the heck back to Burn, both of you..and oh, how could i forget mnm..haven´t seen those initials round here in quite awhile! Welcome all!

Life is good under Lassal´s single!

best
kathleen

PANOS
thanks for passing it on :)

WENDY
the eternal poet. One does not need images when one has your words.

GORDON
thanks really. I do know you do not say these things easily. So I am happy. The tilt … I often use it to eliminate things I do not want to have in my frame and still getting the rest of it rather close. I am not in favor of a tilt as a means in itself, but I find it quite a good tool sometimes.
Thanks again.

YULIA
good to see you here!
Hope all is fine? I always see your picture and your red dot on the map in my mind, when I read your name. :)

KATIA
reading all the comments, I wonder if that man had to endure hell during childhood. I wonder how he looked like when he was 8, 14, when he was at school … when he fell in love for the first time. When his first date took him home to meet the parents … He was not wearing a ring.
hmmm ….

How are your “kids” doing? It was a hard winter … hope all is well.

I am through?!

Yes, that man in the train was special. I did see a lot of different people on that first day alone in the train, and a lot of different expressions, but this man was somehow a concentration of it all, like the condensed shadow of the spirit that I was after. Next to him, the other images blurred and became insignificant … I would have needed not 3-4 days in the train, but much longer, to find more faces like his. Especially because most of the trains I went with were rather empty.

Can you picture how I went stiff when I noticed him sitting there with his friends and let myself fall into a seat diagonally opposite? I NEEDED that face! :) And it was quite a battle to get it. I will spare you this, but it was along the lines that I decided that I definitively needed a inconspicuous point&shoot that I could turn into manual mode.

Thanks all of you for your time and comments. I am aware of the fact of how difficult that can be. I will hopefully have time on the weekend to do a little commenting myself. I have not been on BURN for a while and need to catch up on it.

PANOS
:):) Soooo good to have you!! Thanks for your Skype info, too … “Lassalita”? I had an Argentinian boyfriend once … Memories … :):)

LEE
geee … thanks! :)
How are things on your side of the world?! We definitively need to email. I have you on my list … just give me some more time please, I am still drowning! :)

MARCIN
oh, wow … thanks. This really means a lot to me coming from you. You have clicked through PINK LOBO?! :):) Cool! I was wondering how hard it would be to grasp. The people who now own that place got the idea right away but I was wondering about people who have never been to Lobo. Did you know that DAH almost made it there with us? We were “planning” (loosely) to meet at that place, but I guess it was just a little too off the way. Although I can recomment Marfa to anyone who gets close.

I am still looking for someone to write the text. The person I thought would be perfect is a great thinker but a very insecure writer. Too bad.

DAVID B
hehehe … I could spend hours talking about what happened when they noticed me taking pictures. The short version is in that blog post: http://dark.lassal.de/2009/11/17/workshop-dramas-in-transylvania/

The text I submitted is an excerpt of the blog text. I felt so bad for DAH, after he complained that he was not getting any submissions for singles, that I hurried up to sent him some right away. Thus I copy & pasted the text. I still cannot write English texts in any hour of the day. It does not work when I get into “translation mode”, which makes me sound like chipping wood.
And as I mentioned above: you are right about the viewfinder, which I did not use for most parts of my train rides.

DEAR GRACIE …
I was gone too … wondering how to get back. The picture brought both of us back in. David did.
Good to be back WITH YOU! :)

REIMAR
Danke Dir! :)
Antonin in fact had a good influence on me. As soon as I got back I replaced my old camera with a G10. Antonin had taken an old and beaten G10 to Transylvania and I loved the metal body and the mere fact that something could look so messed up and still work nicely :) He let me use and test it and it is my handbag choice for the day to day since then.
I have been looking at your book often. Thanks again for that wonderful present, which I did not deserve! Yes, let’s talk soon … Maybe we can meet up again? I heard Thomas has a new car … :) Let’s arrange something soon.

HAIK
:)
We have to skype again soon. I am curious about how things are proceeding …

ERIC
good to see you here too. Sorry for not getting back to you the other day. It is just crazily busy here right now. I have so much to catch up with, it is scary.
You are right about JB … :) and … if I am not mistaken, the train picture you are referring to is in the blog post that I linked to above. That was in Copşa Mică. Do you know Antonin Kratochvil’s book “Broken Dream”? Amazing pictures from that place, taken in 1991. All black due to pollution. Today you have to go to the little closed by cemetery to see the blackened grave stones, or the dark skeleton of parts of the industrial complex … The rest has been cleaned superficially, has been washed into the grounds where people grow their potatoes.

JOHN G
;) Yes, that was important.

IMANTS
:)

MNM
Thanks for your words. That man indeed seems to have the scars of history in his skin, does he not? But he was quite dignified as a person. Not a monster at all… as if he had the wisdom of history in his heart, too. OK. We are putting too much into this now :)
I observed him. He was there with 3 other men. All were listening to what he had to say, which he was doing in a very calm but intense way. Quite intriguing. Maybe he WAS an actor?

Good to have you back on BURN :)

JONATHAN
Thanks :)

PETE
thanks for your email … :)

CATHY
Thanks … so sorry to disappoint you, though. Yes, maybe one day. I know of one workshopstudent who got back there to finish her essay … Hmm.

VIVEK
thanks! :)

THOMAS BREGULLA
Thanks for your comment(s) :)
Bukarest is probably very different – I have not been in Bukarest, but in Siebenbürgen. To be precise, in Sighisoara, Mr. Dracula’s hometown. Living right under the shadow of his imposing castle… I bet Bukarest has more of a night life. :)

ERICA
:)

PANOS
Yessssss! Totally movielike! That is one of the things that drew me in. I would be writing a script around that man’s face if I could …

AUDREY
sight … thanks. I did have a huge post, which I wrote in Sighisoara at nights to “feed” some friends&family at home. It was really all in there … but it got lost due to a software update gone wrong or so. Really too bad.
But you have to picture our little group around Antonin, sitting in utter darkness on some wooden chairs of a daytime cafe on the main piazza of Sighisoara – under an ancient oak tree. With the moon illuminating Count Dracula’s castle and our monitors illuminating our faces. That café was the only place with WLAN … :)

PATRICIA
thanks soooo much. I wish I were a better storyteller. I love stories!!! Good stories are such a strong means of communication, of getting a message across … I wish we would spend more time learning this at school …

MIKE R,
thanks, man! :) Yes I usually like it minimal: not more than really necessary. Although sometimes I tend to argue with people about what precisely is necessary for a subject. I usually go for less. My subject is more often than not an abstact one, a thesis, an idea. These workshops are quite thrilling for me, because I have to go about things so differently than I would normally do, with much more preparation. Even if I understand Romanian quite well, I could not but speak the tiny bit that I learned before leaving. If I had known the place, I would have gone about it totally differently. I should have gotten myself a guide on the first day.

Vicky,
THANKS! Yes, the red works well in there … :) Black, white and red … has a lot of connotation.
And the rest (almost) is that man’s face.

Bob, the man of all languages …
you are one amazing person!
You keep surprising me.

Yes, I like the dark. But just as you write, I like to see through it like through a veil. I think it is because I grew up in Brazil, in Rio, in this very old part of town where they were constantly filming those old fashioned colonial style telenovelas … it had this ancient aura… Old and new walls turning black because of the salty, moist air- regardless of how often you painted them. Thick vegetation of all kind of generations, from fresh translucend greens up to dense, heavy, dark & overgrown, long dead woods. Young birds chirping in the trees, happy, and then drowning in light blue swimmingpools, because they did not make it back to the nest. Delicious papaya and bananas growing on wild patches of wasteland, and the intense sickening smell of the decompositing bread fruits in the woods … Everything seemed always to be so much fuller, so much more to the extremes there. The dark was darker and the light lighter than I ever found it again. Tragedy and happyness so close to each other. The dark was beautiful … tragic, menacing, deadly … but beautiful nonetheless… with a heavy smell of ripe flowers. Yes, I guess I still see through these eyes. At least sometimes :)