BORUT PETERLIN in a rabbit hole of photography

br />SND29: The 2007 World’s Best-Designed Newspapers from Society for News Design on Vimeo.
via Newsdesigner.com

New E-book: The Zen Habits Handbook for Life! I like Zenhabits blog and I bought his E-book for just 7$.

Shaolin Kung Fu site is on. I did all sorts of sport but this Shaolin Kung Fu is the most complete exercise by far! We do a lot of exercise for speed, strength, balance, streaching, martial technique, but also a lot of Chi Gong exercise with meditation. Great training for physical and mental strength.

My Londoner friends said I need to see this and since my last post was about portraiting president,… lets see how Annie is doing. She asked the Queen to be photographed on a horse in a state apartment! And asked qween to take her crown off! ha, ha, ha…. That fits my Striptiz concept!

PS: Adobe invented new lens and new concept of photography!

Alison Jackson’s take on celebrity culture via Ted.com

Today there was a funeral of our former president Janez Drnovšek. Today I had a plan to do a reportage, but it was canceled, so I decided to go to presidents funeral. President Drnovšek was on highest political positions since 1989 and he was photographed numberless times, so it was a huge compliment for me, that presidents sister asked Mladina for my picture (above) that was framed beside a book of mourning and given to his daughter, son, sister and closest of his friends.

You might say I’m pathetic and egocentric (I’ll not object ), but I find this as the biggest compliment to my photography. I mean picture is not signed and I didn’t receive a dime from it, but it makes me so proud!

If you didn’t do that sort of portraiture, you can’t imagine how hard it is. You accompany a journalist that is nervous if he/she could ask all the questions and get all the answers he/she needed, and photographer is just a necessary evil to make an evidence that interview happen properly. If that isn’t enough I had a PR person behind my back limiting my time to only five minutes in the beginning of the interview. So I made few pictures, nervous as hell, because I knew although it’s technically OK, it’s far from what I want to. So I put down my camera, pretending that I’m finished. Waiting, waiting, waiting for half of hour, until everybody has forgotten about me, then pick up the camera move to different position and make few more pictures, looking with a corner of the eye how PR person and president will react. The hardest is that you have to behave really calm, moving slowly although your heart is racing and you think all possible scenarios that could go wrong.

The hardest is on the end. Since journalist want to use every second of presidents time, he speak also during portraiture, so you need to get up and say OK, stop! And now the best part of the interview! Journalist please shut up and president Drnovšek, may I ask you to turn your head, step this way, look toward my camera, etc… This sort of power play in portraiture usually lasts about 20-40 seconds, so making a good picture is like throwing a ball in the final second of a basketball game.

I think that the biggest compliment for a photographer is when a picture become independent and lives it’s own life. When it becomes a symbol beyond the time when it was created, beyond the ego of photographer.

OK. I had super busy week. I had a meeting with photoeditor Kate Edwards of Guardian and the meeting went good. I mean I didn’t had a story to offer, but she really liked my work and we exchanged information how we could cooperate in the future.

I met also editor of Foto 8 Jon Levy. I presented my Flower power him and he sounded intrigued. The project is not yet finished and we talked to meet again in May and then he’ll decide if it’ll be published.

I had meetings with two greatest agencies in the world Getty and Corbis. Getty meeting went really good, but crucial person for the meeting was ill and couldn’t join us. We discuss generous plans, so I might go again to London to discuss the matter throughly.

By a recommendation of my friend I went to see important people at Corbis who are dealing with ZEFA hi-end stock production. I was told that my creative portraits are as made for them, but guys couldn’t believe I brought portraits with me. They said is not what they do, but I’m still not convinced, that aesthetic applied in my portraits is not for them. Anyhow I don’t want to do stock photography at least not until I can do reportage and portraits.

A lot of options are open, but basically it comes down to one question. Can I develop from local photographer to a global photographer? I know how to take pictures and I have a network to sell them, so it comes down to the production of stories that are interesting throughout the world. I’m aware that I’m in the position where I need to care of my family and can’t afford to live of my savings, so I decided to do it on a long run. For this year I have two stories in mind one in South Africa and one in Ukraine.

With Tina Košir and professor Alan Macfarlane we made an interview with Neil Turok who is a world renown physician and coauthor of a popular science book “Endless Universe“. I had only few minutes to make a portrait.

He is coathor of alternative explanation of the beginning of universe, stating (by my understanding) that dark matter does not exist and that what is believed to be dark force is just a gravity from different dimension (M-theory). He is close college of Stephen Hawking and if his theory is proven valid, he might be just as famous.

I’m really a fan of popular science and quantum physics. Anyhow this is a small step that really inspired me and I might develop the story on Neil Turok that will lead me to South Africa. We’ll see.

Otherwise I’m really amazed by Cambridge. This is dinning room in King’s College I was surprised by the whole system. How everybody is really working focused. I mean they work hard, but the whole system is fantastically in tuned. From professors, students to the administration. In every step you can feel that this students are chosen and are treated appropriate. Lectures are interesting and looks more like a debate then a professors monologue. In the colleges you can see on every step pictures of Nobel prize winners that used to study here and even I felt that every student could be next Nobel prize winner. By the way. Only Trinity college has more Nobel prize winners than whole France together!

Cambridge is history and since we were guest of fellow Alan Macfarlane we had in depth tour of Cambridge.

This is a room where radio cosmology started by discovering Pulsar stars. Professor Macfarlane is showing Professor Neil Turok a wire by which signal from space arrived for the first time.

They also have silly rules. Like untouchable grass field in front of colleges. Only fellows can walk on the grass. Others can walk only when they are accompanied by a senior fellow.

We walked on the roof of King’s chapel.

Stanka Hrastelj is really interesting poet and I was looking forward to make her portrait for my Striptiz project. I read few of her poems before the shoot and I was shocked by language, message and how poem was so strikingly visual comprehensible. Here are some of her poems in English, but my favorite is one of her new poems Anatomy in a living room. Anyhow I ask her to bring some unusual objects with her and she brought trap for animals. It’s a real torturous device and luckily nowadays it’s illegal to hunt with this. We tried many situations, but on the end the best one was the simplest one. I tried what kind of pressure will it make on her ankle, but it was OK if we closed it slowly – very slowly. It was really cold like 2 degrees Celsius, but Stanka was very patient. The hardest was the expression. She laughed constantly and when she tried to act a pain, she laughed even harder. On the end I choose one really nice expression that is expressing pain and laughter. Stanka commented that is a poetry. Pain with pleasure and pleasure with pain.

Last week as one of the busiest weeks lately. I was preparing for London, working for Mladina, working on some corporate work and spending some time with my family. I didn’t had time to eat or sleep, but I set my self a goal to make two Striptiz portraits in that week, so when I’ll get back to London I’ll not have a time pressure. So I made a portrait of Barbara Kastelic, a painter who paints expressive paintings with chocolate, candies, fruits, etc. I wanted to make a picture in the candy store, but it was prevalentine night, so few stores said no, but Rustika said yes. So here we were in a small store with two studio flashes, a large painting and many customers. It was really not going well and on the end I made a simple picture sort of a back up.
But when I was editing I realized picture at the top is quite interesting picture, so on the end I was very happy I had some luck.

Here is another behind the scene picture from Ban Ki Moon visit to Slovenia. It’s for my project Flower Power.

Last week was super busy and today was it’s peak. I managed alright. I finished my portfolio and it’s printed. Tomorrow I’ll start binding and someday next week I’ll make a post about bookbinding. In Prague at famu.cz academy we had to conclude every yearly project in a book form. Anyway. I’m uploading one of my latest FLOWER POWER pictures presenting a tree blancis oregin and Ban Ki Moon and Prime Minister Janez Janša in the back.
LARGE IMAGE

This email is in Slovenian. Local affair. Sorry

V soboto šibam v London in se bom srečal z nekaj agenti. Sicer svoje portfolije ponavadi sam naredim, a dva projekta še nista končana in sem se odločil, da jih predstavim v mapi / fasciklu. A ve kdo kje v SLO bi lahko kupil primereno mapo? Seveda vem za klasične mape, a potrebujem nekaj kot je
http://www.shoptheartstore.com/product_detail_multiple.cfm?groupID=E3701E79-CE74-42CD-9CF4BFDB8BCACA40&parentCat=2355C0DA-C685-414F-9BA81BCB7BD9816D&topCat=28164D2C-605A-47E0-BD8931754E36D374
Hvala,
B5

PS:
Jutri bom šel v cumulus.si pogledat, a mislim, da bom opalil iz vseh topov in naredil knjigo tudi iz nedokončanih serij. Dodatni predlogi so dobrodošli.

Large picture
Buch is a legend among comics collectors. He have every issue of every comics published in the region of Yugoslavia. Few years ago he opened a store Strip.ART.nica with second hand comics. He told me a lot of anecdotes about comics collectors. He said that some people are having sort of challenges who knows more about comics. He said that the best of them knows by heart not only every episode from 2000 issues, but also in which page which scene happens. The most bizarre thing is that when this comics fanatics deployed all questions about details o comics, they started to challenge who knows at what price certain issue was sold. In Yugoslavia we used to have a huge inflation, so comics had every issue a different price.

Anyhow I had to make his portrait and I knew that the key for the good portrait would be mixture of two-dimensional and three-dimensional world. Like I made a very successful portrait of Darko Tomič, a comic collector. So I didn’t copy the concept and execution of the picture, just the principle.

My friend Jure Kocuvan just bought a huge 23″ iMac and was showing me a Mac OS X Leopard operation system. I really liked the way you view folders, so I decided to make comics as a three-dimensional objects and with a mirror I’ll make a person as a two dimensional object. I was not sure if it’ll work, but it did! Jolly good! I’m planning to make a book with my portraits.

Jure Aleksič will write his profile and I’m looking forward big time!