There is little to say about myself – at least on this website. Perhaps this:
Around 1994, I was about 40 years old, the first mobiles appeared. You couldn't take pictures with them, of course – the highlight then was sending an SMS. The world had to wait another 10
years for the first smartphone able to take selfies. Digital photography was also still in its infancy at the beginning
of the 90s...
Anyway, the portrait of me was taken analogue, in miserable artificial light, with the camera put on and self-timer. It is, of course, the only colour photo on this website and also one of the
few pictures that show me without me subjecting it to self-censorship.
It was perhaps at this time that I had my first serious encounter with the phenomenon of
photography...
In terms of content, https://www.swmph.website is, in a sense, about the essence of the
medium: Absence of color is still relevant after 180 years of "photography". At the beginning of "writing with light", anything else was technically impossible anyway. There really isn't much to
see in the world's first photograph, "Point de vue du Gras", taken around 1825 as an experiment by the Frenchman
Niépce. His creator called the process Héliographie
(drawn with the sun); later he collaborated with his compatriot Louis Daguerre; the official beginning of photography
(daguerreotype) is now generally considered to be 1839. However, it took almost another 100 years until color pictures were
available to "everyone" – the first mass-produced product for amateur photographers was presented by the Agfa company
in 1936. In principle, (moving) color film was "invented" shortly before 1900, as the latest findings show; before that, black-and-white material was hand-colored.
Now there are – to put it unkindly – motifs where color simply 'disturbs'. Supposedly child's play to 'snap' with the smartphone results in pictures that simply have 'too much' on them
– and it's all colourful too! Personally, this flood of information makes me rather dizzy, and the need for abstraction increases. And this is what you get with black and white photography!
There is only a lot of gray (black), a little gray (white) and – hopefully – as many gradations as possible in between. Everything else is done by the brain of the viewer. If you like
my work, but also like it really colorful, you will find it on www.morenz-fotografie.de...
Andreas Feininger, whom I esteem, 1906-1999, son of the likewise admired painter Lyonel Feininger (Berlin
Secession/Bauhaus), was a trained architect, later a photography teacher. This Andreas often spoke of 'photographic seeing' and also published a
book on the subject (Photographic Seeing, Prentice-Hall, 1973).
So don't shot something first and then have to retouch it. Sounds easy – but you have to get it right first;-)
Almost all photos on https://www.swmph.website are converted, digital or analog color images. Of course, a conversion alone does not automatically provide
new (better) quality – on the contrary. Some of them turn out to be rather trivial, but some do improve compared to the original version. Often, the hidden qualities surprisingly emerge only
during the subsequent processing, as in the case of the image on the home page. Actually taken with b/w film (Ilford, 400 ASA, is only the very first photo in the menu item Interior. It comes
from my own early photographic days, which must have begun sometime in the mid-1970s...