Tag Archives: paulgreenphotovideoart.com

Thoughts & Photos from Havana Cuba October 2017

October 2, 2017 Paul

(paul evan green) — View over Central Havana to Vedado

Havana is a great place for me to do things like writing blogs and working on the huge backlog of video editing I’ve created for myself. Having a Cuban girlfriend brings me close to Cuban people and I’m interested in their lives which are very different and difficult. The news that the U.S is discouraging tourism and is scaling down its embassy staff in Havana by 60% will have a huge impact on the ordinary Cuban who in most cases lives way below any poverty line we know of in the rest of the world.

Despite this poverty imposed from above and outside Cubans remain proud, creative, resourceful and hopeful that things will improve. President Raul Castro stands down in February 2018. Next month there will be municipal elections to select candidates who will decide on the new President. Cubans are hopeful for positive change bringing modernisation, more efficiency and opportunity.

I have avoided walking the streets with a camera on the last few visits to Cuba. I see many street photographers walking around with their Leicas and various other symbols of photo artistrty all trying to create cliches of cliches and I guess I’m guilty of it as well. It is hard to avoid cliches here.

My first visit to Cuba was shortly after Obama’s. There was a big improvement in the relationship which also trickled down to the average Cuban. Without giving it much thought Donald Trump has pledged to be a wrecking ball for any of the good things that came out of the Obama administration.

The average salary for a Cuban is around U.S $30/month. One hotel worker I spoke to told me how he went twice to the U.S embassy to apply for a visa to visit family at a cost of U.S $160/application only to be refused in less than 5 minutes each time. That’s more than 10 months salary gone in 10 minutes.

Now there is a fear campaign because of the Sonic attacks on U.S diplomatic staff both in the embassy in Havana and in a hotel run by the Cuban military. I don’t believe the Cubans are capable or responsible for this kind of attack nor would it be in their interests to deliberately damage their relationship with the U.S.

Havana has some beautiful old buildings and many are being restored. Others are crumbling around their inhabitants. There is money being made but the average person is poor. Supermarket shelves have very little to offer the customer and the basic diet is lacking in variety. Government controlled internet is of very low quality at an exorbitant price.

Budapest, European Photography, Photography, photography poland, poland, Uncategorized

European Photography Summer 2017

September 7, 2017 Paul

European Photography by Paul Green. I started of in Budapest in the 3rd week of August to work on a family history project for a private client. Budapest is a city that I knew a bit about but always wanted a reason to visit. It’s a charming city with magnificent architecture. I enjoyed walking around in my spare time.

New York Cafe

Four Seasons Hotel Lobby Gresham Palace

(Detail) Memorial For Jews shot by Nazis on the bank of the Danube

Formula One came to town and that was my cue to leave. I decided to have a look at some small towns in Poland and headed by bus to Katowice. I was interested in the Pre-war Jewish history and it’s always difficult to find any traces. I found the Jewish cemetery and a couple of monuments. There is still a very small community in the town.

From Katowice I went to Zakopane in the south of Poland. Here I was interested in the architecture and the mountains. I started doing some timelapse sequences and did a lot of walking.

Timelapse combining sequences from Zakopane and Radomsko

Radomsko was the home town of my father’s grandparents although they didn’t ever talk about the place much. It was a major Hassidic centre in Poland. When my great grandparents lived there it was part of Russia. There are still a few old buildings there so i was trying to look at things they also would have seen. Trying to share experiences with them.

Beautiful windows in an old apartment building

Old Jewish owned building

(Detail) Mass grave in Jewish Cemetery

My second job was in Zdunska Wola. This was a beautiful art project entitled “The missing mezzuzot of Zdunska Wola” by Estelle Rozinski. This was my 5th visit to Zdunska Wola and it was primarily a filming job. I took very few images for myself but I was struck by a stack of mazevot (Jewish Grave Stones) in the back yard of the museum. The Jewish cemetery in ZW is very beautiful partly due to the excellent stone masonery .

Stack of Jewish Tomb Stones Zdunska Wola

After filming the 73rd anniversary commemoration of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto I arrived in Warsaw.

Old Town Warsaw

leonard cohen poland, photography poland, poland

Leonard Cohen in Poland May 2014

May 10, 2014 Paul

I'm your Man the Life of Leonard Cohen — I’m your Man the Life of Leonard Cohen

I’ve just returned from a trip to Poland where I was working on a documentary film about a young couple getting married. He is a Fijian Indian Hindu and she a Polish Catholic.

It was a relief for me to be working in Poland about a theme unrelated to the decimated Polish Jewish community and its culture that had been my focus on previous trips.

In Sydney over the summer, I had bumped into my friend Rita who worked in Martin Smith’s bookshop in Bondi years ago. Rita is also from a Polish, Jewish background and had recently visited her hometown. She was working in Oscar and Friends bookshop in Double Bay when I went in to pick up the book I had ordered.

I had ordered Murray Bails’ book “The Voyage”. Bail’s is a book about an Australian who goes to Vienna to sell his revolutionary new concert grand piano. The story is loosely based on the Stuart Concert Grand Piano from Australia. It was a good read and I empathised a lot with the central character who like me didn’t speak German and had problems being taken seriously in the old establishment of Vienna, a major centre of music, art and culture.

During our long conversation, interrupted many times by people buying books I kept going back to the shelves and picked out a biography of Leonard Cohen, by Sylvie Simmons. I wasn’t sure about the choice but Rita said she’d heard it was a good one and I took her word.

Last year in the late summer I had been in Poland and had wanted to see Leonard Cohen perform in Lodz but it never materialized.

Lodz is the town of my paternal grandmother’s family and once had a very large Jewish community.

I had seen his Sydney concert a few years ago and I knew his music and a bit of trivia about him but I took this biography with me on the long train journey from Vienna to Katowice and then to Lubliniec and was making very good progress and enjoying finding out more about the life and career of this great artist and poet.

The sister in law of the bride turned out to be a big Leonard Cohen fan and had been to the concert I hadn’t been to but it surprised me that Leonard Cohen could be so popular in Poland.

It turns out that there is a Polish comedian, writer and radio personality called Maciej Zembaty who had translated and performed over 60 Leonard Cohen songs since the 1970’s. Zembaty had been imprisoned by the regime in 1981 for organising a festival of songs on the regime’s banned list.

Zembaty’s Polish version of Cohen’s Partisan Song had become the unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement.

I’ve included some links to Leonard Cohen documentaries online.

Paul Green +43 676 942 2558
paul@paulgreenphotovideoart.com
www.paulgreenphotovideoart.com

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lubliniec, Photography, poland

A Week, Tuesday to Tuesday in Lubliniec Poland.

May 1, 2014 Paul

It’s springtime. I’m in a rural area of Silesia about 60km from Katowice. This is one place where English doesn’t work but people do try to speak to me in German once they realise I can’t speak Polish. You can see more of my work at www.paulgreenphotovideoart.com

I’m here making a documentary about a young couple who met and now live together in Sydney. Karina and Sachin are getting married on Saturday in Karina’s nearby home town called Kalety. The doco is about the joining of a Fijian, Indian, Hindu family and a Polish Catholic family.

The project was dreamed up and is being produced and directed by my friend Chris Cole who has an architecture practice in Fiji and who knows Sachin’s family.

Chris worked as a cameraman back in the pre digital days of film. It has been a great experience working with him and learning a different approach from someone who has ducked the digital revolution and hasn’t worked in the industry for many years.

This week has been very important for Polish people. Their beloved Pope, Karol Józef Wojtyła, or Pope John Paul II was canonized by the Vatican as a saint by Pope Francis.

Pope John Paul II is recognised as helping to end Communism in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe. John Paul II significantly improved the Catholic Church’s relations with Judaism, Islam, the Anglican community and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Another Polish saint who is celebrated in Lubliniec and who was canonized by Pope John Paul II is Edyta Stein. Also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edyta Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church and one of the six patron saints of Europe.

In 1938 she and her sister Rosa, were sent to a Carmelite monastery in the Netherlands for their safety. They were arrested by the Nazis on 2 August 1942 and sent to Auschwitz where they were gassed on 9 August 1942.

Although Edyta was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw) in 1891 she spent much of her childhood in Lubliniec as it was the hometown of her grandparents.

I visited the Lubliniec Jewish cemetery yesterday. Originally the cemetery was divided into three plots: for men, women, and children. In all, 1,117 people were buried there.

The Nazis devastated the cemetery during World War II and used the gravestones to pave the road from Lubliniec to Żuków. In 1958 the Polish national authorities took over the cemetery and opened a driver training centre on the site. Fragments of gravestones were piled up in a few heaps.

Among those buried in the cemetery are the grandparents of Edyta Stein: Adelajda Courant and Salomon Courant as well as Edyta’s elder brothers: Emst and Richard.

biography, bondi beach, Photography

Artist in 2 of her 3 personae. Meet Gretel Pinniger and her Alter Ego Madam Lash.

March 2, 2014 Paul

I’ve known Gretel Pinniger for many years. These are 2 portraits I took of her one night at Florida House, Palm Beach in 1996.

The first is Gretel as Gretel and the second is her alter ego Madam Lash.

Gretel’s manifesto on Art will give you more of an idea about who she is:

Manifesto on Art

I believe that True Art comes only from the highest impulse within ourselves, which we must seek and find by a process involving Faith, Focus, Discipline and constant Practise. For me this is so exhilarating, blissful and such Fun, my dedicated wish is to share my views with as many people as possible.

I look to the example of the Greatest Masters of Art and Music to find what I seek to bring to the practise of Art. In company with them, I am concerned with only the most exalted subjects – Religious and Spiritual themes and Portraits of only the most highly vibrational individuals, usually themselves Musicians and Artists of all kinds and other people I admire as being well advanced on the path to human enlightenment. I celebrate their art and personal qualities with my own abilities, in the belief that I will leave behind me each time, a work which will give pleasure to many generations through contemplating what I do. I hope that they may know this person or this state as I do, through my art. Therefore for me ‘art’ concerned with misery, squalor and inhumanity, or portraits of unenlightened people or losers, suicides or murderers are not for me.

Although I have been painting for over 25 years, with new focus in the last 3 years, I have so far, never sold and hardly ever parted with any of my paintings. They are painted from the pure delight of doing so, and my belief that, that painting should exist.

I intend my works to be placed only in major public places where they may live after me, eg. Opera Houses and Galleries. The others stay with me and are to be incorporated into my larger ‘Works in Progress’, ‘The Kirk’ Cleveland St, Surry Hills and ‘Florida House’ Florida Rd, Palm Beach, both of these being large old stone buildings, now being transformed into live in Art Works where I seek to attract under my roof the energies of any and all like minded Art and Fun-Lovers on the basis of “The better you look, the better I look, the better we’ll all look”.

Gretel Pinniger,
a.k.a. Malame Lash and now
The Immaculate Lash

These photos were taken with a Rolleicord Twin Lens camera which had a 75mm Carl Zeiss f3.5 Tessar Lens. This camera was manufactured from 1933 till 1976.

The Tessar is a famous photographic lens design conceived by physicist Paul Rudolph in 1902 while he worked at the Zeiss optical company and patented by Zeiss; the lens type is usually known as the Zeiss Tessar.

A Tessar comprises four elements in three groups, one positive crown glass element at the front, one negative flint glass element at the center and a negative plano-concave flint glass element cemented with a positive convex crown glass element at the rear. He named the result “Tessar”, from the Greek word τέσσερα (téssera, four) to indicate a four-element design.

I bought this camera from Grace’s Camera Bargains in Victoria St Potts Point in Sydney in around 1993. I adapted it with a Prism Finder from a Mamiya c330 which was fun. I don’t know where the camera is now.

I used this camera for a number of other photos at that time including my “Bondi Rock” photowhere I painted the surface of the rock with light over a one hour exposure at night.

Selected photos can be viewed or purchased from my website at

www.paulgreenphotovideoart.com

biography, bondi beach, Photography, photography italy, photography poland, photography vienna, poland

Approaching 25 years as a freelance photographer

February 20, 2014 Paul

I’m not very good at maths so it took me a while to subtract 1989 from 2014. How things have changed in that time. My main camera through the 1990’s and turn of the century was the Sinar P. My kit consisted of 75mm Schneider Super Angulon, 90mm Schneider Angulon, 150mm Rodenstock, 240mm Rodenstock, and 480mm Apo Rodagon lenses, 6×9, 5×4 & 10×8 Backs. Price entry level for photography was a whole different ball game. There were long days and nights in the darkroom processing film and completing Black & White print orders as well as astronomical monthly lab bills. I always say that I bought Mr Kodak 3 houses but also 1 each for Messes Fuji, Agfa, Ilford and Polaroid. Back then my bread and butter was doing big jobs for Artists, Museums and private galleries. I still do this kind of work but the jobs and budgets have shrunk. Throughout the years I have never stopped doing my own photography. Some of my personal work can be seen on my website at www.paulgreenphotovideoart.com

I’ve been traveling and working in Europe for the last 15 months and recently returned to Sydney. During that time away I was concentrating on a number of commissioned jobs and exploring some personal themes. Initially I went to work with Australian Artist Mike Parr to document his large scale retrospective and new performance piece at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, Austria. I also completed a book of Art, Food, Culture, Agriculture and Archeology of the Roman region of Lunigiana in North West Italy. This will be my 3rd book about this part of Italy. The first 2 were “Soffritto” & “Lucio’s Ligurian Kitchen” of which both were very successful.

Most interesting for me was the work I completed in my European Ancestral home of Poland. This is where my Hassidic Polish great grand parents lived and I was fortunate to visit their home towns. I photographed extensively and produced some very interesting and contemplative photographs on my first visit during the Winter of 2012.

In the Summer of 2013 I returned to Poland to collaborate With Judy Menczel & Fay Sussman on a documentary film about contemporary Polish/Jewish relations, Klezmer Music, & Yiddish language. http://www.documentaryaustralia.com.au/films/details/1667/fays-journey. The film has full tax deductability status and we are looking for financial support for this very interesting and important doco.

Throughout the time in Europe my home was in Wien or Vienna. Vienna is a quiet and small city with a long and multi faceted history. I find it a wonderful canvas for street photography and I love certain aspects of the cultural life and food there. Mostly I am able to get work on large projects done there. I find it very easy to focus on a task and not be distracted. I am returning with some very interesting ideas for photography and a new body of work.

Since returning to Australia I have been working on editing the Poland film, documentation of a Kaldor Public Art Project with Slovenian artist Roman Ondak, and my continued involvement with Artists Mike Parr and Ken Unsworth.

The first thing I did on my return was to go to my storeroom and get out my Hasselblad camera. I’ve been using this camera almost exclusively for all my personal photography in Sydney over the past 3 years or so. I’ve been getting through roll after roll of 120 Black & White film. I’m looking forward to a big scanning session at Silverpixel studios. This camera and its Carl Zeiss lenses is the benchmark in German optics and will replace my canon 5dMk111 on my return to Europe.

I’ve been really fortunate to have done so much magazine work in Italy during 2013. I’ve teamed up with a wonderful journalista,Paola Ciana who has had many years of experience as fashion editor for big Italian women’s mags. She made the switch to writing and photographing beautiful houses. So far we’ve been published in magazines such as Velvet, Io Donna, La Repubblica, Marie Claire Maison and Elle Decor. This has been a wonderful learning experience and has given me access to some magnificent Italian homes and interesting people. Also it has had a slightly demystifying effect for me on the Women’s Magazine market.

So to my new business plan: I’ve set up my website as a resource library where interesting images can be uploaded and sold either in print form or as a digital download. I’m hoping to improve the SEO capabilities so I can make a significant number of sales through the site but hope that people will take a look if there’s a need for a gift or need to find images for magazine stories and books. I’m still available for freelance photography, film and writing work and will be living between Europe and Australia in the foreseeable future. Every blog or business advice I’ve read about the pursuit of a fulfilling and successful career in photography recommends that you follow your own interests and speak with your own voice. This I have always done and continue to do. Photography is a tough gig and there is no job like it when it comes to great rewards of time spent.

Please take a few moments to look at some of the photos from my website………… http://www.paulgreenphotovideoart.com/

Paul Green Photo Video Art Blog