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Marcel Weber
@tales.of.the.north
Best of the week 37 at #nomadict 2020
Wanderlust is a feeling that accompanies me daily. Though I don’t know if it is really wanderlust, or more a sort of profound feeling of homesickness to places I have not even been. But how is that to be understood?
I live in Germany near Frankfurt am Main. Germany is a wonderful country to live in and you can lead a good life here. In my daily life away from photography I work as an educator in a day care center with children aged 3 to 6 years. My work is beautiful, enriching and I learn something new together with the children every day. But to be honest, I am a dreamer and not a day goes by where I am not somewhere else in my head.
Together with my parents I traveled a lot as a child – almost all across Europe and also to Asia and North America. It was exciting and thrilling to get up early in the morning, to drive to the airport, completely sleepy, and in the evening already to be in another country. For a child who grew up 500 kilometers from the sea, this large, moving, seemingly mystical expanse of water always had a very special fascination for me – a fascination that I only felt when looking at the stars.
My interest in photography already originated back then. I liked to take countless snapshots and put pictures in photo albums. Sometime in the mid-nineties I must have gotten my first own polaroid camera. Unfortunately I don’t know what happened to it. As I got older, traveling with my parents became rare and I spent less and less time abroad. I went to school, worked here and there. Either I didn’t have enough money to travel, or I had money but my friends didn’t. So I stayed in Germany and to answer my curiosity for photography, I bought a Canon EOS 450D for 600 Euro from my first real salary. That was back in 2008 and it was probably the most expensive thing I ever bought myself. With this one I took an incredible amount of pictures, without having much knowledge about aperture, exposure or other settings just yet.
Then, things changed and I was trapped in a period of time where wanderlust did not exist anymore. I spent the next 10 years in my hometown and except for a few days here and there I spent most of my time photographing nature in front of my door. I lived alone in a small flat inside a high-rise building and broke off my first attempt at training as a teacher for financial reasons. I lost my mother and my best friend in a very short time and spent my days riding my bike and clearing my head. With my cell phone I took thousands of pictures, but left my camera unused. I rode my bike, sat in nature or took refuge in books. There I discovered strange and new places in this imaginative world.
"One day, out of a sudden, an important person walked into my life and things changed for the better."
The days had more light again and my purse had more content. In the summer of 2017 we cycled for two weeks together through the Netherlands – from Amsterdam via Haarlem towards the west. As we were riding along a long road in Zandvoort, I knew that at the end of this road I would find something I had not seen for a long time. At the end of the road was the big, wide sea and it didn’t take long until the first wave washed around my feet. We spent the next few days at the sea, sitting on the dunes in the evening with the gas stove, cooking our own food and watching the sunset. How much I enjoyed the moments when there was only a small red shimmer on the horizon, the sun was setting and we were walking along the beach through the water. I often listened to the soundtrack of the film “Gran Torino”, which perfectly matched my mood.
It may sound strange but I am often melancholic. Since my childhood I have had this diffuse feeling of sadness – the sadness about the inadequacy of the world. I am not an unhappy person but I am probably happy when I am melancholic. In my opinion, melancholy also contains a motivation and an inspiration that people have always processed in the form of art. I like books where the hero dies in the end. I like the view back into the past. I like melancholic music. I like the art of romance. I like the original, the wild, the mystical. This is where my fascination for the sea comes from, for the power behind it. For rough and rugged mountains. For the view into the stars. I like an original, almost mystical picture of the world, a romantic picture of times past. I try to find that in my photography and that’s what I have been painting on paper since my childhood. I like the sad in the beautiful.
To come back to my trip… After my reunion with the sea, after almost 10 years, the feeling of wanderlust was suddenly in me once again and it didn’t take long until I had to visit the sea again. My partner and I camped in Northern Germany in autumn 2017 and visited different islands. The Danish island Römo fascinated me the most. It was a beautiful autumn day, where sun, long shadows, rain and rainbows alternated. It was the northernmost place I visited at that time. And in this kind of landscape I felt something that made me remember something I seemed to have forgotten a long time ago. In the evening I sat there and knew that I had to go further north. As a child I dreamt of Iceland and now this dream came back to live within me. I was always fascinated by the north – of discoverers and stories from the ice – of those who set out to go where no one had gone before: Discoverers, treasure hunters and whalers, of all those who went north. And at that time, at the southernmost edge of Denmark, I had no exact idea of the north. But I heard the call of the north for the first time.
In Northern Europe you can find loneliness, but also a strong society of people. You can find all the contrasts of life; I think there are only a few places where you can experience the seasons and life as rich in contrast as there. It is magical in every season and every day, and it is there that I find everything my heart longs for. It is the perfect environment for a melancholic person like me. It corresponds to my original, mystical and wild image of the world. I like places where man still has to follow nature.
The picture that gives me the opportunity to write all this now, the winning shot, was also created in Northern Europe. At the Uttakleiv beach in Norway in autumn 2019, where I had my first car ride alone after the driving test. A night drive through Norway, in an old car: a pure catastrophe, but I survived.
WINNING PHOTOGRAPH
BEST OF THE WEEK 37
The lighting scenes in Northern Europe are incredible. No matter if it is midnight sun or the northern lights – it is breathtaking every time. For me it is the perfect place for pictures full of longing and originality. I draw my inspiration from my imagination, the nordic landscape, music and art. Of course I have only been taking pictures for two years and I am still in the very beginning but I know where I want to go some day.
To quote Townes Van Zandt:
Interviewer: “How come most of your songs are sad songs?”
Townes van Zandt: “I don’t think they’re all that sad. I have a few that aren’t sad, they’re like… hopeless. Totally hopeless situation and the rest aren’t sad – they’re just the way it goes. I mean you know you don’t think life’s sad.”
To me it is not important whether my photography is liked or commercially successful. To me it is most important that I like it. To me it is important that what I do is real. I honestly want to do more than just photograph a beautiful landscape. A beautiful photo is beautiful but nothing more. I want to take a photo that means something to people. I want to take a photo full of emotion, full of longing.
I once photographed a dead bird in Iceland but this picture was not very well received on Instagram – but to me personally it is one of my favourite pictures. A dead bird that almost looks as if it is sleeping on a beautiful beach, touched by the light of the rising sun. The individual life ends while the course of life is just the beginning of new ones and the sun’s warmth shines on our faces. The bird is the sad center of a picture that is otherwise full of beauty and warmth. To me personally this picture does not only reflect a dead bird. In my opinion it reflects life how it mostly is: beautiful and yet somewhere quite sad. But that is life and how it goes.
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