Photo: private
Photo: private
Warm summer days and trips to an amusement park in Upper Palatinate. A long journey, always visiting one of his mother’s friends on the way there and then a day at the amusement park – a dream for little David Buchner. Think about that David Buchner preferably when he thinks back to his childhood. Later he became interested in lost places and took photos there. Once he managed to drive back to the park, which has since been closed. A defining day for David Buchner. He was able to make the memory of those days clearer again. “Seeing it abandoned was crazy. Everything about the park was changed. Except the warm feeling, that remains. You could still go into the buildings, only this time they were no longer busy,” he says. Before visiting this park, he experimented with his photography without much of a concept. Since that day he has known that his photos should always convey warmth.
In his photography, David Buchner, 28, wants to reproduce memories in an abstract way. In 2019 he moved from his hometown to Munich. Since then, he hasn’t let go of the topic of letting go and saying goodbye. Some friendships have ended and “people have left holes in me that I didn’t notice until much too late,” he says. That’s why David Buchner decided to use this as inspiration for his concept for the exhibition “10 in a Square”.
A darkened room, ropes and barbed wires that are supposed to hang down in front of the musicians, a studio light. The refractions of light in his photos represent the warmth “that runs like a red thread through the images.” Attached to the barbed wires: three letters that all musicians should write before the shoot to let go. About people, things, experiences or places. Musician Allan Cari wrote the letters to his ex-girlfriend, his childhood toys and his hair, which he cut off. On this day, the musician Elias Bohatsch will be in front of David Buchner’s camera. Elias Bohatsch runs into the room, looks at him briefly, says “Nice!” and smiles.
Music has a big influence on David Buchner’s photography. He collects a lot of song lyrics and is inspired by them. At the moment he likes to listen to electronic, country, metal, but also music from the 70s, for example a lot of Bob Dylan. “I listen to everything and am open to everything. If you lock yourself into genres, you really miss out on a lot,” says David Buchner. When music as a hobby didn’t work out about nine years ago, David Buchner discovered photography. Back then he walked around and took photos of everything with a monochrome filter. For a long time he shot everything in black and white, so David Buchner was able to experiment a lot with light. As he took more and more photographs, there was a time when he often went to Lost Places, which really excited him. After buying a better camera, David Buchner started working with colors. Nowadays he always takes very conceptual photographs.
Back to David Buchner’s concept for “10 squared”: Why did he choose such a set-up? He wanted morbid symbols to emphasize how difficult the subject was for him. For him, the things he said goodbye to became unattainable. That’s what the symbols are supposed to stand for.