Beate Wätzel

My 6×6 camera. Old and strange. „Defective“ – somehow. With a strained shutter that only sometimes does what it is supposed to do – bend to time. Randomly chooses when the shutter closes again, how much light hits the film, how much time is banned. Randomness built in – somehow. Totally random – somehow. Contrary to the general idea of photography – the definition of aperture and time.The 6×6 always in the luggage, phenomena gather. Light drawings over unstaged present images. Analogue preservation of digital impulses. Light as information from on and off, as sequences of ones and zeros, as carriers of information. What happens to the information when divergence is allowed?

I surrender to the mystery. I allow the moment to show what else is, besides our perception. I allow – time, light, space. Because coincidence is no coincidence.

It all began in 2015 in a disturbed Paris. Attacks at night, in the morning a blood-red sky over a silenced city. The desire to show exactly this sky, exactly this silent city. Later, chiselled traces of light are found – single ones, from sparsely lit windows, following the same direction – skywards.

Since then, these traces of light can be found irregularly and surprisingly again and again on the negatives of the old analogue 6×6. And only there. As if my consciously chosen motif were potentiated and charged by an incognito signed anomaly.