Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

My friend Tobi came to visit me in the U.S. for two weeks, and so we decided to take a road trip to New Orleans. Together with Beth we embarked on the 15-hour drive down to the Big Easy. To cut a long story short: We had a fantastic time. I always knew that New Orleans breathes music, but experiencing it live is a whole different thing. We only spent four days in the city, but I fell madly in love with it. Together with San Francisco, to me New Orleans is the most amazing city in this country.

On our way to New Orleans we got into a huge traffic jam just outside of Memphis. Everything was deadlocked for hours, and finally we found out that an anti-government activist and his son had shot and killed two police officers during a routine traffic control. Law enforcement had to close off the bridge across the Mississippi for the man hunt, causing a complete still-stand for several hours.

You haven’t been to New Orleans if you haven’t had a crawfish boil by the Mississippi river…

The cemeteries in New Orleans are all above ground because of the swampy soil the city is built on.

Outside the Bulldog bar where we watched the tragic Champions League finals of Bayern Munich against Inter Milan.

In New Orleans, music – good music – is everywhere. Even the musicians in the street are great. But this one here topped everything I had ever seen before. We were in the bar and heard the band playing, until one of us noticed that there were more instruments than people on the stage. At first we thought they were playing stuff off a loop. But when we took a closer look, we realized the he was playing a rhythm guitar in one hand, a lead guitar in the other, and a bass guitar with his feet. Go figure…

On our last day, we took a field trip to one of the many Bayous around New Orleans. The nature out there is incredible.

Here’s another set of pictures from my trip into the past times of analog photography, shot between February 6 and February 13. They’re just random snap shots of things that cought my eye in the streets of Columbia, but it’s all stuff that sort of makes this town what it is – at least for me.

Even though it’s blurry, there is something about this image that I like. It sort of has something mysterious about it, with the clouds, the lights in the windows and the smoke (or vapor) that’s rising up from the Mosque.

Where else than in the window of Arnie Fagan’s “Cool Stuff” on Broadway can you see Moses next to Big Foot and Jesus next to a Smoking Elephant?

I wish the flag in this picture would be somewhat clearer. This is what happens when you got spoiled by the insane ISO speeds of digital photography and then go back to shooting with 400 ISO film…

Snow falls in front on Lakota’s on 9th Street. Moments after I took this picture, the sun came out and shone through the snowflakes and a guy was standing outside in front of the window in the backlight smoking a cigarette. I missed it because I was talking to a friend and when I noticed it it was already too late. By the time I had my camera up, the sun was gone. I still regret missing that picture.

The view from our apartment at night.

Being fed up and frustrated with the distanced and removed nature of my recent photography and inspired by a dear friend, I have decided to take a step back in time to when photography for me was not merely a tool to tell stories, but rather a little miracle, a slowly revolving series of secrets, without a delete button and a display for instant results. A time when a picture wasn’t born out of the feeling that what’s in front of me is an important part of the story that I am expected to capture, but simply out of a mere impulse, a feeling of space, time, light and moment all coming together that makes my finger push down the button.

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that telling stories in pictures isn’t good. In fact, I believe that it’s one of the most wonderful forms of communication, otherwise I couldn’t be doing what I do. But I do believe that with going digital, I have lost part of my passion for this medium, and lately I was approaching photography very stiff and methodically. Going back to shooting analog black-and-white is my form of therapy to regain what I’ve lost somewhere along the way – and ideally what I find will carry over and enrich my “professional” photography.

These are just some random images from a day out at Devil’s Backbone with Sibylle and Marine last week and some shots of a hilarious night of Ping Pong and Karaoke last Thursday. It was the first roll of film that I shot in almost four years, and I loved it…

A couple of weeks ago, Bharat and I decided that we wanted to get away for a few days from the daily routine of student life in Columbia and go someplace where we could just relax and forget all those ethics papers, HTML codes and final projects. For a while, we thought about going to the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, but then a few days before the Thanksgiving break, Mike Flynn called me from Oakland, Calif. Mike was my exchange partner during a high school student exchange program in 1998 and we haven’t seen each other in about eight years. Excited about the idea of visiting him in California, I went online to check flight fares and found a round trip for $250.00. Bharat didn’t need to be convinced. He was all for it and so last Saturday at 6 a.m., we left for Kansas City to catch our flight…

Sunrise at a gas station somewhere between Columbia, Mo., and Kansas City on Saturday morning.

As soon as we reached California, Bharat put on a happy smile that wouldn’t leave his face until we came back to Missouri…

Mike and his girlfriend Aliya at Fort Mason. We stayed at Mike’s place in Oakland, where he introduced us to the world of Domino and Bay Area Rap.

Mike has an orange tree growing in his back yard, and for the first time in my life, I had oranges fresh from the tree. I’m not lying when I say that these were the best I’ve ever had.

Saturday night, Mike and Aliya took us to a concert of the band Cafe Tacuba at the Fox Theater in Oakland, an amazing, palace-like theater that was recently restored. The tickets were $40.00 each, which seriously conflicted with our budget, but when we got there, Mike overheard two guys in front of the theater talking in Spanish about some tickets that they had in their hands and asked them how much they wanted for them. And sure enough they gave them to us for free! So we went to this concert and it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. Cafe Tacuba’s music is incredibly rich and diverse and these guys pulled off one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take more pictures because they wouldn’t allow us to take our cameras inside. Only when the show was almost over, we checked out our bags and went to the balcony to snap a few frames.

Early afternoon at the Port of Oakland. Urban legend has it that the cranes seen in the background inspired George Lucas to design the AT-AT snow walkers in “The Empire Strikes Back” after them, but Lucas himself denies that.

In the F-Train at Fisherman’s Wharf.

The surf at the cliffs of Fort Mason.

Dessert at the Mission Pie Cafe…

…with Vince Tong (left), a friend of Mike’s and Aliya’s, and John Bowman (who I met in SF last March).

Somewhere in the streets of the Mission, on our way to a bar…

…where I just couldn’t resist playing a few riffs on my cue stick guitar.
Photograph by John Bowman

Bharat is taking a break from our Long March from Fort Mason to the Golden Gate Bridge on Monday. The walk was my idea, and it took us about two hours to get there. Our feet were all sore afterward and when we found out that there was a bus from Fort Mason to the Bridge, Bharat seriously considered throwing me off the Bridge for a few moments.

The late afternoon light falls through a small group of trees somewhere along Marine Drive.

Sunset at the Golden Gate Bridge.

Monday night, John took us to the steepest hill in San Francisco. Time for some fun…

Tuesday afternoon on Market Street.

Evening panorama from Twin Peaks.

I know it’s a cheesy picture, but the sunset on Twin Peaks was gorgeous.

On Wednesday, we met my room mate Tim who came to see his girlfriend Autoosa in Berkeley. They took us to the Indian Rock Park, from where we got another breathtaking view of the San Francisco bay. Tim and Autoosa are on the right in the picture.

Playing with the reflections in the window of a BART train on our way to downtown San Francisco Wednesday evening.

Wednesday night we had dinner at the Chan Chan, an awesome Cuban restaurant on 18th St. I really loved the atmosphere of that place, and couldn’t stop taking pictures of Bharat and John in front of this amazing background… This one’s my favorite.

After dinner, John gave us a lift to Oakland and we stopped at Treasure Island, halfway across the Bay Bridge, to catch a last glimpse of the city at night. Once again, we had an unforgettable time in this truly magic city, and it’s just a matter of time until I will be back to the Bay…