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

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

More fresh bread! #MyQuarantineLife #QuarantineDiaries