the pinaki.info blog

It is half past eight at night and we are sitting down to coffee and Irish cream over dull green kitchen tiles and a single lamp. Stinky the cat – who was lost and later found with the promise of a reward that wasn’t kept – looks up, the bare bulb reflecting off perfect saucer eyes.

I’m trying to figure out if I should move in and risk Stinky scratching my most coveted lens, or keeping a safe distance and giving the subject a lot of room to breathe. That sort of reminds me of the conversation I was having with Dieter Wertz, the movie set designer from Dortmund, who also shoots landscapes with a medium-format Mamiya, as opposed to me, who shoots people with a small-format camera. But while we both have very different portfolios and tastes, we do agree that photography is more about what you leave out than what you keep in. He calls it exclusion, while I call it looking for metaphors.

Now, I must say I think cats are a waste of space and Stinky is too cold-hearted and empty (or is that just me?) to be a friend of mine, so maybe he isn’t exactly the metaphor I am looking for. But on a night where I wangle a coffee out of Stinky’s mistress and dinner from her sister, he will have to do.