In quadro - Rolleiflex

A series of square medium-format photographs taken on film with two twin-lens Rolleiflex cameras, a model T and an Automat.

The square format and the analog workflow impose limits and change what happens before the shutter — an exercise that, for me, returns photography to its essentials. The weight of each photograph changes, and so does its poetic quality. Through the waist-level finder the composition becomes more deliberate, and the twelve frames on a roll curb improvisation — or rather, the impulsiveness of digital.

Working in black and white lets me follow the whole chain, from the shot to development to silver gelatin printing or digitization; this opens up new “interpretations” of the image in analog post-production.

The Rolleiflex often travels with me. This is not a themed project but an anthology of what I have shot with it over the years: Berlin, Venice, Budapest, Rome and other places in central Italy.

A hazy riding-school yard: a donkey lies on its back on bare earth beside a pink two-storey stable block.Street scene, black and white: a woman sits below a deli window as a tattooed hand covers her eyes.Two men punt a slender flat boat across a calm lagoon at hazy sunset in Venice, Italy.An earthquake-gutted village house in central Italy, roof collapsed to rubble, its doorway still standing below snowy mountains.Black and white, a lone corrugated-metal shed on a patchy snow-covered plain, bare snow-streaked mountains in the background.Low-angle portrait on a bus: an older woman in a red coat and grey scarf gazes out of the window, a cane handle beside her.A Venetian gondolier in a straw hat and red-striped shirt sits on a wooden bridge, canal and old palazzi behind him.Black and white, a cat sits on a low wall inside a derelict greenhouse, looking out through a broken glass panel.A towering Soviet-era bronze statue of a flag-bearing soldier; a small hatted figure stands at its base, hedge behind.Misty lagoon at dawn in Venice: wooden mooring posts and a channel marker rise from water, a faint shoreline on the horizon.Black and white, a homemade wooden ladder leans against a dead tree on a hillside, mountains fading behind the branches.Berlin street scene: a young person in a curly white wig, bow tie and brocade coat walks past a scaffolded building.