Focus on NICOLA VON LEFFERN

Vienna, Austria

Taking a picture to me is like hitting the ‘freeze’ button on a world that is spinning much too fast to be enjoyable. It gives me the opportunity to remember selectively. I am collecting moments, stocking up on color & light for grey days to come. Photography to me is like writing a diary, just for lazy people that rather point and shoot and start reflecting on it days later, when the film returns from the laboratory.
Images to me are like speaking a universal language. Like silent movies whose plots were understood worldwide without ever needing translation.

Communication without words turned out to be the main reason why I fell deeply in love with photography. I have always had a passion for story telling, images, escapism & voyeurism - so I chose to become a TV journalist & filmmaker. On a study abroad program in Spain I was faced with a number of language barriers and therefore difficulties to work & study in those fields, so I decided to trade my courses on audio- visual media for darkroom & photography assignments on the university of fine arts, salamanca.
The hours in the darkroom there required nothing but patience and of course the usage of analog cameras. I never came to like digital photography after that, neither overly retouched pictures or creating images in photoshop.

I like the realism of analog photography, straight out of the camera.
I love when the medium - the film - plays its part very visually, not only as a canvas for light, but also for texturing and influencing the outcome in surprising ways, meaning grain & light leaks, scratches and so on.

I go through phases of loving certain cameras. Right now my number one companion is the Yashica Zoomate 70 because it is small and robust and can join me everywhere and anytime. Also it is old, I got it from a local thrift store, and seems to have a little bit of a will of its own. Sometimes shots get beautifully out of focus, or the edges turn out to be decorated with little light leaks.
I love the how unpredictable this is.
My other favorite camera of the moment is the Salyut- S (= Салют-C), which was the first attempt by the Soviet camera industry to produce a sophisticated SLR medium format camera and represents a near copy to the Hasselblad 1000F or 1600F. Whoever hasn’t shot with a medium format SLR yet doesn’t know what they are missing out on!

www.NicolavonLeffern.com

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