Beginnings

It's day 14 of this 15-day project. Let me end with this self-portrait. It captures well the mood at the end of the journey, the calmness and gravity of a new beginning, as well as the determination with which I planned to meet it.

Exiting the hotel the next day, I felt grounded, curious - and happy, of course, seeing my wife again and meeting the place I now call home.

In hindsight, the two-week transition period was a strange gift. The boredom didn't linger too long, but I kept the questions and ideas I found, the goals and plans I made. Together they gave me a lot of clarity, strength, and determination in the weeks and months to come. A few others I hold onto a bit too firmly. I had to force myself to let them go later as I learned more about what this place and chapter are about for me.

Thank you for staying with me for this experiment. I hope you enjoyed it!

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei #hotel #quarantine #臺灣 #台灣 #🇹🇼
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #voigtlander40mmf12 #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic #quarantinediaries #consciousness

Night

How many people might have looked at the moon that night? And how little can words say about the longing, loneliness, love felt in those million moments?

Images and photos are a way to cross that chasm - but only a little bit. The numbers describing blue and orange pixels too cannot say much about that moment. Was this really the color of the night sky? It's one of the few photos I didn't edit at all, but the colors you see are still determined by the optics of my lens, the way the sensor works with the light falling in, the way the camera is programed to deal with that information, the way RAW files are compressed to jpgs, and finally the technology of the screen you use. It's a very scientific process in the sense that if I took a hundred photos (fast!) and did the same thing a hundred times, the photos would all look very very similar. But it still says so little about what actually happened at that moment.

The thing is... everything is like that. Our eyes work like that, different of course, but still the same. The images we take, words we use, data we gather, stories we tell - it's all an entangled mess somehow rooted in whatever happened in the quantum soup we call "reality." It's a chaos of which we can only experience a tiny tiny tiny part of through these entanglements, everyone of us on our own.

There is no problem here. It just reminds us how small our language and images are.

Taipei is cloudy now, so please greet the moon from me.

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei #hotel #quarantine #臺灣 #台灣 #🇹🇼
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #voigtlander40mmf12 #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #nofilter #quarantinediaries #consciousness

The Lookout

I wrote about things with a soul last week - how they can make a place your own. The same can be said about certain corners and spaces.

One or two days into the two week I spent alone in quarantine when moving to Taipei, I got frustrated from circulating between the desk and the bed in the room. My yoga mat on the floor marked the third place in the room, there was a slightly-too-hard-slighty-too-dark-slightly-too-far-away-from-the-window couch, and that was it for the beginning. Then I realized the window ledge behind the tub (there was a tub!) was broad enough to sit on!

I moved a pillow there and picked my favorite towel for some extra colors. (Douglas Adam's style - this was a space journey after all!) Thus my "nest" was born, in which I spent much of the evening hours the next days.

Al this was very very very deliberate, as every tiny way to make that small place more "gezellig" with the little stuff I had had a direct impact on many hours spent over the days and weeks to come.

There are parts of the apartment I currently live in for which I have similar attention and care. And yet others are a bit forgotten. Was it the limits of time and space that had called for such deliberation - compared with the change and chaos of everyday life now? We like to speak off-handedly of "mindfulness" in these circumstances, but doesn't this risks to reach once more inside, not into our surrounding?

For me, photography once more became a nice tool. It allows us to see the space we live in in a fresh way. To capture the random items lying around as a story of us - or not, by reminding us of them during composition and nudging us to remove them for a more pristine image.

How do you create and remind yourself of your favorite places at home?

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
🚀 | #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic

Aquarium

I love it to go out on the balcony by night or look out of the window, to watch the lights in other buildings go on and off, to watch people living their private-evening-selves.

I wrote about life journey and life stories in the last days, using words and images to reflect. With all this, it's easy for the ominous Self or Ego to become bigger and bigger, until all that remains of the rest of the world has crumbled to a formless something in the corner of the mind. In these moments, looking out reveals how ridiculous this it. When there is more information and life in the few images of one of the many high rises, in the few branches of a tree or the feathers of a bird than in all the what-ifs we came up with.

I often find it utterly fascinating how low the "resolution" of our dreams is. "I want to be a doctor" he says and thinks of little than his title and a bit of money. "I want to be an astronaut" she says and thinks of little but a shiny circle in the sky and maybe iron being thrusted into heights with a feeling of a shaking merry-go-round. Yet do they really think of how minutes flow into hours into days into weeks into months of doing what doctors and astronauts do?

All this becomes even more true with the internet, where after scrolling for an hour or two we struggle to remember a handful of images or stories, where reading news articles leaves us with little more than that others too don't like politician A or business person B. How humbling it is then to watch out of the window and see how many many people (or birds and trees) there are just a few minutes of walking away from us of whose lives we know so little. Lives taking place in what looks like just an aquarium from our balcony.

What is the resolution of your dreams?

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #reflection #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #cinematic

Reflection

"Reflection" is an interesting action, to let your mind more or less run wild and hope something useful will stand at the end. (How wonderful that's often the case!) German philosopher Andreas Reckwitz argued that self-reflection is not necessarily something "natural," but a social practice like many others that was developed during the Renaissance and in its aftermath as people started to write and read and to construct stories and narratives about their lives. I think it's an interesting idea, but I'm a sucker for slightly-too-big social theories. At least the way ("Bullet") journals and Note-taking apps and diaries are marketed speaks to the theory that reflection indeed is a rather personal (solitary) practice based on writing.

This need not be so, though! First there is of course a conversational approach to reflection - a long walk with a friend along the shore during winter or around an autumn lake, for example, a mild summer evening on the balcony with one too much bottle of wine - pick your poison. (Even dinner at a meditation retreat or a therapy session might work if you prefer your friends not to know... whatever.)

And then there's photography! It's actually one of the things about photography I like most, the silent dialogue it allows with myself. While in normal times it is quickly directed outwards, towards people in the streets, birds in the air or the water in the sea, it took an inward-turn while I spent the two weeks in quarantine. "Reflection" here obtained a literal meaning, as I looked at my image on the screen of my camera or fixed my reflection in the window.

What role do images and photos play in your reflective practice? Are they the starting point of a habit of contemplation? Have you built rituals around them?

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
🚀 | #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic

Signals

I am thinking about the space between rationality and intuition a lot lately. Or maybe rather between that which we have words for in order to explain and a logic to which to (sometimes) agree; and that which bubbles up from somewhere but that lacks the words other than "hunch," "feeling," "idea," maybe "I want," "I don't like," "I wish," "I desire."
When we come to a new place or things change a lot, it might be easier to trust our intuition, our "gut feeling." It becomes more difficult when things have settled and there should be words. But aren't we fooling ourselves about how much we know and especially how much we can explain?
I am usually very good with words, and yet I have learned to appreciate and be honest towards myself and others about how little I actually know when making decisions. Why meet this person and not that person? Why work on this project and not that? Why try this approach? How even to come up with an approach to try?
It is truly fascinating where these signals come from. I remember sitting on that ledge and feeling very attuned and open to the light nuances in my emotions and the place around me. How I reacted to buildings, moods, ideas about where to go, what to do, who to become. I like to remind myself of that time, to look beyond the routines of my life now and think of of how arbitrary many of them actually are.
Are you tuned in to your intuition these days? Where do the signals come from to which you listen?

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei #hotel #quarantine #臺灣 #台灣 #🇹🇼
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #voigtlander40mmf12 #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic #quarantinediaries #consciousness

Honeymoon

The stage for our voyage into my inner depths is almost set, there is the spaceship and the outer world. You might ask about the performers, but there really is just one, me.

I had a copilot, so to say, missing a lot as she flew on a different deck of the spaceship (exactly one floor below): My wife. Ironically, this journey could have been our honeymoon. We married in the weeks before, in the high-times of the pandemic in Germany. As if packing everything up and saying goodbye to friends and family were not exiting enough, we planned and re-planned our wedding three times while the rules shifted from allowing 20 to 10 to 5 people. Because of this, we ended up having three weddings (with each of our families as well as at the marriage bureau) - and another good story.

Yet, the honeymoon was effectively canceled by the quarantine rules, as I was stuck in my room, she in hers a floor below. Long telephone conversations were a bit pointless as we quickly learned, given how little there was happening in our lives. We made a habit out of eating together instead, to talk about the lightened rooms in the high-rises before our windows, the street performers we could just so see in the streets below.

With this thin band connecting me to people outside, I was confronted with the question what to do with my time...

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🌏 | #taiwan #taipei #hotel #quarantine #臺灣 #台灣 #🇹🇼
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #voigtlander40mmf12 #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic #quarantinediaries #consciousness

Freedom Fortress
The change from my cozy third-floor studio in Berlin to a 20th-floor hotel room with a view that reminded me of Blade Runner was one thing. The cultural difference was probably bigger. "Cultural" here takes a very abstract yet specific meaning - after all I haven't really interacted with "the culture" at all.
No, the stark cultural difference took the form of laughter and loud music from musicians, street performers, and shoppers from the pedestrian streets and malls below. It was the contrast between Germany's "you are only allowed to celebrate you wedding with three other people"-lockdown mode and Taiwan's "lol, everything goes, we did our homework" Zero Covid success. (Which was of course embraced with sincerity and respect towards other countries and their shit-show! The "lol" was the dark jester inside me.)
After learning to treat other people like the literal plague for a year, it was strange to see the crowds of people underneath when pressing against the window. The fact that it was hardly possible to make out actual people from so far up made this contrast even stronger.
Anyway. The memories have faded since. We had our vaccines, outbreaks, herd immunity here as well, the masks have come off. But during that time it was of course central, I spent 15 days alone in a hotel room, after all, leaning out of the room to grab my food three times a day, careful not to step over the threshold, pressing "1" on my phone each morning after getting a text from the health department asking whether the pest had awaken within me.
It is hard to capture the weirdness of that time with photos when they look so normal again. I hope the once-more cinematic editing can translate a little bit of this feeling...

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Original: bensahlmueller.com/2023-07-19

🌏 | #taiwan #taipei
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #manualfocus
🚀 | #urban #urbanphotography #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #cinematic #quarantinediaries

Other Worlds

The "space ship" mythology through which I tell myself the story of my move to Taiwan works on several levels. It first describes the solitude and confinement of the hotel room in which I spent the 15 days of my quarantine. But it also describes my relationship to the world around me, which I was watching day in day out from far away but was not able to interact with. This outer world indeed felt like a different world. Its buildings were taller, the architecture different, signs in a different language, and everything else equally strange. My perspective on all this strengthened this effect, living in the 20th-or-something floor, it was hard to see individuals instead of just masses.
I took this image at night, when the feeling of strangeness was usually at its peak while I saw my yet-unknown new life slowly unfold behind the window glass. Compared to the European life soaked in centuries of history in Berlin, Taipei felt exciting and new. This contrast was heightened as it was my first time in Asia - after the pristine tourist beaches in Thailand and a short stint in Bangkok, that is.
The image is quite chaotic, more geometric in its composition than anything else. As I tried to capture the feeling of a world that was still alien to me, the again-cinematic edit works well for me.

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Original: https://bensahlmueller.com/2023-07-18

🌏 | #taiwan #taipei #hotel #quarantine #臺灣 #台灣 #🇹🇼
📷 | #a7r #voigtlander #voigtlander40mm #voigtlander40mmf12 #manualfocus
🚀 | #photography #urban #urbanphotography #architecture #quarantine #reflection #mindfulness #storytelling #newromantics #existentialism #existentialphotography #self-portrait #selfportrait #cinematic #quarantinediaries #consciousness

Space Ship

This photo starts the meditation on what I call my "space ship journey" in the mythology of my own life. My wife and I moved to Taiwan in January 2021, in the high times of Covid. Taiwan was a paragon of dealing with the crisis, its strict Zero Covid policy meant there was no pandemic on the island. It also meant we had to stay 15 days in quarantine, single quarantine with two separate rooms, that is.

The two weeks were a very weird and special time. I have never spent two weeks on my own in a single room (plus bathroom), especially not after uprooting my old life, moving to a different continent, and in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, there is hardly a period in my life I was as conscious about... time. In advance, I had been very deliberate in planning what to do in order to not get insane. Once there, I of course counted the days and hours. Daily check-ins with the health administration and rigid eating times strengthened this impression. But I also consciously tried to "make something of that time."

Mostly, though, it was the strange way my mind interacted with the room that made the time special. How the threads of my thoughts filled every inch and corner of the room, how they started to root and blossom. I still remember it as a very mindful time in a good sense, with weird entanglements, and I sometimes wish I could uphold some of the practices from that time in the rush of my everyday life.

All this makes this image a good place to start. It captures the tension between outer stillness and inner mind storms. And through its cinematic edit it fits my memory of this week as something slightly otherworldly.

(Some housekeeping: This will be A Real Piece Of Art as we go through this in "real time!" Let's see whether the boredom or intensity of the original two weeks will have the upper hand in the end. I hope you stay with me!)

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📷 | #a7r #voigtlander40mm #manualfocus
🏔️ | #existentialphotography #self-portrait #newromantics