Childhood is a fleeting point in time, a dreamlike parallel universe of carefree days. A moment in which possibilities, potential and the ‘what can be’ of the future unfolds. The child’s skeleton grows, skin stretches and they reach up toward adolescence and the high clouds of adulthood, as a flower opens to sunlight.
Image Credit Oliver Raschka
Oliver Raschka’s Here and Now is an ongoing work focused on his young sons as they push forward into life. The German photographer uses street photography techniques and working methods to translate this journey, track and record their lives into a visual sociology.
“I try to capture these unique moments in a honest way, as they come up in a natural manner. I don’t ask my sons to pose for me,” Raschka explains. “I keep a camera on hand as often as I can, so I am able to record their life in a fluid way. So these images are candid — not staged — but always subjective. The photographs display unfiltered, intimate slices of our young family life featuring my sons Philip and Justus.”
Image Credit Oliver Raschka
In one shot, a little boy with a frown can be seen through the rear windshield of a car. A drinks can, a little ornament and a pair of sunglasses on the shelf in front of him. The boy looks meditative and we can imagine that in a few seconds he will be off playing and carefree again. Seen through the glass, however, the photograph has impact. While the child is thoughtful the glass ‘barrier’ renders the image slightly opaque and reminds grown-ups that we have lost this childlike innocence, there is distance now between us and who we were as a child.
The momentary contemplative look on the child’s face is also symbolic of growth and the great unknown, and the many questions that await us all as we develop. Questions of identity, who can I be, what will I do, what will adult life be like…of time moving quickly as our life sails on across that vast ocean of existential possibilities and everyday realities.
“I like the basic idea of street photography,” He says of his way of working. “I like to capture unaffected and random events with a candid approach…in a raw and contrasting black and white style – Daido Moriyama is king. Black and white alters reality. This allows me to transform everyday motifs into an art form, without losing their urban rawness.”
Image Credit Oliver Raschka
Oliver Raschka is an academic – a doctor of economics. He is also only too aware of the eclectic nature of street photography. By turns, the art form has geographical, political, sociological, historical and economic elements. Not to mention philosophical aspects, post-modern, late capitalism, digimodernism – you choose.
“Since I have studied psychology and industrial organization,” Raschka tells me. “I am interested in individual behaviour, and the underlying sociological, urban and physiological structures, which are not necessarily visible at first sight. Manuel DeLanda, a well-known modern philosopher, sums it up very well, when he says :We live in a world populated by structures, a complex mixture of geological, biological, social and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of material shaped and hardened by history (from 1000 Years of Nonliner History, 2000, p25).”
Image Credit Oliver Raschka
In a photograph reflected on a car’s side glass, a young boy, presumably the elder son imitating his photographer father, captures the ghost-like figure of a woman. To emphasise the fact we can clearly see the word ‘phantom’ behind the woman’s shoulder to the left as we look at the picture, but there is depth to this photograph.
The smoky opaque impression of the woman against the glass being shot by the child, also seen in the car window, connects the two in art, as well as by genes (assuming that she is the child’s mother). The child acting as an adult (his father) but nevertheless the child, and that carefree childlike innocence that she is reminded of, but no longer has.
“I want to document the life of my children,” Oliver explains. “They are an essential part of my life with my camera. Only when my beloved mother died in 2012 did the project really progress. This was just eight months after my second son was born. My life was in continuous movement and took new meanings in very quick succession. Since then I found myself reflecting on life and death. Nowadays I look closer at my own life passing.”
It is clear that as well as making art, and using street photography as a vehicle to achieve this, Raschka is searching for some indication of meaning as an adult. His children, perhaps, remind him of his own childhood, of what is lost in the transition boy to man, girl to woman.
“The boys, my wife and I have a common song in mind when we spend time together. From the famous German band Die Toten Hosen called Das Ist Der Moment (This Is The Moment). This is our day, this is our time, and she won’t fly past us anymore, because this is the moment, the one you’ll dwell on,when you think back someday.”
It seems an appropriate choice, a young family at the peak of their journey as a unit, capturing that ‘moment’ together. His family, as well as being central to his existence is also, at this juncture, an outlet for his art.
Image Credit Oliver Raschka
“Photography is my resource of creativity and beside my family it holds my life in balance,” He explains. “Here and Now is my first project where people play a main role. The images for Here and Now are unpredictable and follow an intuitive approach. I want to document the extraordinary in the everyday of my two kids, Philip and Justus, now eight and five years old. Not as a father, but as a photographer and thus also away from the usual stereotypes of family albums.”
I think Rachka succeeds. In Here and Now he portrays the younger son with a clown, apparently, growing out of the side of his neck. A signifier, on one hand, of the outrageously wild humour of the child – why did we ever laugh at the sight of a door falling off a clown car? But also with just the edge of something a little more sinister and frightening, all those vivid nightmares of malevolent ‘funny mens’ and ‘scary monsters’.
Here and Now works as an existential piece of art with the emblems of street photography at its heart. It is a blend of a specific photographic genre – street photography – and the lives of two young children in motion as they grow and develop. His use of the techniques of street photography give the project a candid vibrancy that works, it is thought-provoking, at times funny, laced with the frightening prospect and ironies of life itself. The material that drives us to stretch and form into adulthood also takes us on beyond ‘humanhood’ toward our own private, perhaps spiritual, Armageddons and exit from existence.
That’s street photography, that’s art….
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