Micro Intro
This post will be as fast-paced as my visit—and hopefully just as worthwhile. Here’s the plan.
First, I’ll present Warsaw and Berlin, side by side.
Next, I’ll include a swift account of my visit, the first in fourteen years. (But watch out because I’ll be experimenting with a second-person diaristic style I haven’t perfected yet.)
After that, I’ll share the fourteen photos that I’ve shortlisted for the occasion. They have their own story to tell—not exactly one about what I did or where I went, but rather one about when I was moved to reach for the camera.
Finally, I’ll wrap up with a couple of pictures that wouldn’t have made the cut if not for the very satisfying way they dance together.
Sister Cities
Everything is a little puzzle to solve. Spot the similarities, note the differences, study the signs.
If you find yourself charmed by the message on the back of the Polish bus or by the horse on the German façade, you might also appreciate how I only discovered these details back home on the big screen. (My long-distance vision is not so sharp; it’s part of what drew me to photography in the first place.)
The Travelogue
Seventy-one hours is enough time to leave one city behind for a weekend and see what it’s like to live in another while your teen son gets to practice some yearned-for independence. It’s enough time to wonder at the contrasts, gain some traction, learn new steps.
Importantly, seventy-one hours is enough time to devote plenty of attention to the main event—a three-day Klein Technique workshop taught by Hanna Hegenscheidt at Studio 142 in Kreuzberg’s Kunstquartier Bethanien. It’s also enough time to begin integrating the fundamentals of Susan Klein’s remarkable approach to body alignment and to start imagining the possible long road ahead to new postural patterns and to the possibility of moving with less effort, more grace, and far more power.
It’s enough time to bump into people you know from elsewhere at the Thursday night contact improv class and jam at Marameo, where one AW (dancer and teacher Andrew Wass) mentions another AW (CI and BMC teacher Andrzej Woźniak, whom you’ve profiled on this blog) in connection with the head holding reflex and the benefits of unlearning it to get the most out of dance. After that, it’s enough time to join the Friday night jam at Phynix Tanzt, where the faces are even more familiar, for now they include a few you remember from yesterday. (It might have been enough time for a jam at Tanzfabrik, too, were it not the wrong kind of alternating Saturday.)
It’s also enough time to practice balancing one’s footing and expanding one’s mind at the Jewish Museum, where a huge part of the experience consists of listening—to your own breath against the silence of the vast Holocaust Tower, or to the foreboding clang ten thousand iron faces on concrete make when a visitor walks across Fallen Leaves, the 2001 installation by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. But it’s not all bleak at all because there is hope everywhere and light in the eyes of the people around you. And finally you find your epiphany in a quote by Rabbi Heschel that adorns a spot on the wall and manages to dislodge something you’ve been trying to get unstuck that concerns your attachment to possessions. (“It is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.”)
It is enough time to visit the trance-inducing sixth floor food emporium at bourgeois KaDeWe and to stumble into at least four different Bio Company supermarkets, which repeatedly bring you to a state both calm with pleasure and urgent with desire.
It’s also enough time to mount a proper counterattack against the fruit flies invading the kitchen of the Neukölln apartment you’ve miraculously been invited to use by that friend who is new and close at the same time, and it’s enough time to have three restorative nights of sleep in her bedroom, which is all yours while everyone is away.
Furthermore, seventy-one hours is enough time to take around eighty photos with your new Fujifilm X-T5, of which you’ll keep thirty and choose to show seventeen. It’s even enough time to meet a friend for lunch in a part of Mitte close to Prenzlauer Berg, then head south into the mist and effortlessly get your best shots of the city.
But seventy-one hours is not enough time to take those shallow-dug U-Bahns to the far corners of West Berlin, where you lived with your parents as a junior in high school the year that Pulp Fiction came out, which was not long after the Wall came down. That’s for another jaunt, which you’re pretty sure is just months away—after all, those hamstrings and trochanters are ready to play and Hanna’s soothing instructions sure help boost your endurance.
The Photostory
If I had more flexibility about mixing portrait and landscape formats, I’d include the uncropped streetscape of the crosswalk with the fog-obscured iconic Fernsehturm in the background. It’s way better as a vertical (see above). But I like Ordnung and I’m not afraid to slash and burn parts of things if it means my columns and rows are more tidy.
The Sendoff
If you’re into this sort of thing, toggle between the two photos below and delight in the visual treat, which required just a bit of über-exact crop editing on my part. Moreover, this zippy diptych is a good metaphor for the trip I just took, and for the inner journeying it has inspired.
