Photography News | Issue 33 | absolutephoto.com
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Zeiss Award winner Running alongside the Sony World Photography Awards, the Zeiss Photography Award debuted this year. We find out more from the first ever winner
photographer I choosewhat pictures I want to show so no one knows how many pictures I missed. That is just my problem. If you took your Indian train pictures for yourself why did you enter them into the Zeiss Awards? I finished the story and used it for a course I was doing at university in India – by the way I got a really low mark for it. When I came back to Hannover I asked my tutor, Rolf Nobel, if I could use the pictures for part of the course, which was on travel photography, because I hadno time to shoot anything else. I showed him the pictures and he was the one who thought it was a strong story. He was surprised how good the work was and encouraged me to believe in it and send it to newspapers. I thought so many people travel in the train who would want to publish such pictures. I felt really small sending my pictures to a newspaper but Stern magazine said ‘yes, we’ll take them’ and I thought ‘my work in Stern , oh my God’. I was overwhelmed and then I got an exhibition in Papillon andmore andmore people started to like this story – I thought it was just nice for me so why would someone else like it. I thought the pictures suited the Meaningful Places theme. I didn’t have pictures of monuments but why shouldn’t a train compartment be a Meaningful Place? It is daily life in a small place and every day so many people experience this so this is aMeaningful Place for them. So what next? I want to be a freelancer. I don’t have an agency and I’m not thinking about having one. For me, the nice thingwith this is that I can just work on my own stories and for long as I want to until I think it is done. It is my work and I don’t want anyone to say ‘do this, do that’. I live low budget so I can work on my big stories until they get published, then I will be happy and can eat! And work on the next story. That is my dream for my future just to do on really big stories that I can work on for weeks, months or even years and then get published to finance the next story. Above Tamina-Florentine Zuch won this year's Zeiss Award with a portfolio of brilliant images of her train journeys in India.
two or three years until I found how I wanted to work and what stories I wanted to tell and then I gradually started shooting real stories. What led you to do the pictures that won you the Zeiss Award? The winning project was the biggest I have done to date. I did an exchange programme in India at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. I was there fourmonths. India is sucha complex country and I didn’t understand the culture and the more I tried to understand it, the less I understood. There is a caste system, so many religions, somany cultures, somany languages and it is so diverse. It was really frustrating to realise that if you are not born into something that you just can’t understand it. In four months I wanted to get to know as many people and see as many places as possible and just get a closer look at Indian society but I wasn't planning to do a story to publish. It wasn’t long enough to do a story about something I didn’t understand. I just wanted to do something for myself, about what I sawandhowI felt so I had the idea of travelling by train. Did you get a good reaction from the passengers? Were they okay that you were taking picture of them? Did you ask permission? Almost all of them were happy. Of course a lot of people don’t speak English, but when I was there I always have the camera hanging round my neck. So when I walked into the compartment I was this girl with a camera so when I wanted to take a picture I tried to make eye contact and show them my camera and they would think ‘okay, go on then.’ You are in this compartment for hours and even days so they just can’t go away and they are stuck with you. Or when I saw a situation and thought by the time I asked permission the picture would be gone, I took the picture first and waited for them to turn tome and I’d show them the picture and say ‘look that is beautiful.’ It is difficult because there are so many tourists shooting poverty and behaving badly. It does make the job very difficult because people think you are one of those who snap
people sitting on the ground. You have to try to give them their pride back and show that you really care. That is really important forme. Howfardoyou thinkyou travelled on the trains? I think I did over 20,000km. The longest journey was three nights, four days. It was really exhausting being on the train all that time especially travelling third class. I love travelling on the train in any country because you can sit there and relax or read something but in this situation I was always looking for something to happen and if nothing was happening, I’d just walk around the train all day. Or I’d sit by the door waiting for a nice landscape. There was pressure not tomiss something. I was always on my own but I never felt unsafe. When you are in a different country it is important to behave properly. In India I saw lots of girls in short skirts and smiling at themen, but I always hadmy ankles covered up and a headscarf and I was very straight with themen. What camera kit did you use? I had a small bag because I wanted my kit with me all the time because there is so much pickpocketing on the trains. I hada24mmanda 35mm lens with a Nikon D700. I had four charged batteries and the charger with me so I could recharge when I got to the hotel. You can charge things on the train too. I have no idea of many pictures I took. I don’t photograph too much. Some people shoot thousands but I am really slow. With a situation I hardly take three pictures. If I am waiting for something to happen or the right light, I just wait and then take the picture. I don’t take pictures while I amwaiting. What were the big problems taking pictures? Was it dealing with the low light, for example? With the train it was difficult when the sun very high. Of course it was very dark in the train and almost white light outside the windows and that destroyed the atmosphere. I still took the picture but wished it was morning or evening, which would be much nicer. But you have to shoot when the situation happens and that’s it. The thing is, as the
Interview by Will Cheung
German-based Tamina-Florentine Zuch was the first-ever winner of the Zeiss Photography Award, which runs in parallel with the Sony World Photography Awards, the world’s biggest photo contest. Both contests are organised by the World PhotographyOrganisation. For 2016 the theme was Seeing Beyond – Meaningful Places. Different interpretations of the theme and the term ‘meaningful places’ were demanded. Entry was open to professional and amateur photographers. A total of 22,000 images were submitted from 3139 photographers from 116 countries. Tamina won with her set of images, Indian train journey. You can see her complete entry and the shortlisted entrants on worldphoto. org website. Her prize included camera lenses to value of €15,000 and the chance toworkwith Zeiss. PN: Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself please and howyou came to be a photographer? TFZ: I am in the last year of a five- year photojournalism course at Hannover University. I left school with no real interest in photography. I was originally studying communication design. The main coursewasphotography,butfashion
and product photography. I thought ‘oh God, this is nothing about telling stories’. I wanted to meet people and see how they lived and learn what 's important to them. So I went to do photojournalism, knowing nothing about photography. The first year was learning about photography and how to compose and so on. I was never an equipment freak. If someone asked me what lenses I used I’d really have to think about it. I wanted to get close to the people that interested me and the camera is like a door opener. I could turn up with a camera and say I wanted to take pictures of them and spend three weeks with them – people understand that. It wasn’t photography that fascinated me but what I could dowith it. Do you find it difficult going into a strange environment and start taking pictures? No, that was never the problem. It was more the equipment that was hard forme and getting to use things like apertures and ISO – I had no idea what those things were to start with. Most of my fellow students hadbeen intophotography for a long time so I had to learn the basics so I could do what I wanted. That took
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