Nicolas Balcazar, Berlin, 2013. Photo Achim Drucks
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Nicolas Balcazar, memories, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, am ende denk ich immer nur an dich #2, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, du davon und ich entgegen #4, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, untitled, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, memories - infinite sadness, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, we must never be apart #2, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, Land-schafft #1, 2013. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, Gaghiel #1, 2013. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, Sahaquiel #1, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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Nicolas Balcazar, Sahaquiel #2, 2012. Courtesy Nicolas Balcazar
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“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.” This statement by Lewis W. Hine
can be found on the last page of a small catalogue containing Nicolas
Balcazar’s most important images from the past two years. In the early
20th century, Hine documented child labor
in American factories. Balcazar, the young Berliner, reveres the great
pioneer of socio-critical photography. Despite this, however, Balcazar
does not see the camera as a tool for exposing social injustice—even
though his show of photographs in the Studio of the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle
testifies to how brown coal mining is destroying entire landscapes.
Like Hines, Balcazar also believes that he can better express what
occupies him with images than with words. He is less interested in
stories, however, than in moods and feelings.
Sehnsucht
(Longing) is the title of Balcazar’s catalogue. “You feel something
deep inside, but you can’t express it or conjure it up again. Longing
is elusive, and that is exactly what my images convey.” The son of a
Peruvian father and a German mother goes on to explain that this
longing is connected to people such as his deceased father, whom he has
dedicated his catalogue to. Or to places where Balcazar has lived or
traveled. “Because I travel so much, I sometimes don’t know where I
would most like to be. Longing—for me, that’s the perfect word for
these moments, when I’d rather be somewhere else or when I miss a
person or a place.”
His photographs have been taken all over
the world—for instance in Lima, the city he grew up in, and in Berlin,
where he was born and returned to in 2004. This is where he studied
bioinformatics, and where, following his master’s degree, he worked on
the decoding of genes at the Robert Koch Institute,
among other places. Or in Shanghai, where he completed a one-year
internship, as well as numerous European and Asian cities he got to
know during his travels: Priština, Lyon, Lisbon, Kuala Lumpur. For him,
travel is as natural as taking the subway, says Balcazar. Once you
experience the youthful panache of the 28-year-old, you immediately see
that a statement of this kind has nothing to do with attitude. His
photographs show what he encounters along his journeys, not as
something foreign or exotic, but as documents and random impressions of
landscapes, streets, and architecture.
Balcazar is a
self-taught photographer. At the age of twenty he returned to Germany
from Peru and bought himself a small digital camera for the occasion.
“I was really just interested in recording what happened to me—and
sharing it with my family in Peru.” Eventually, a true passion grew out
of this. Parallel to his studies, he began exploring the possibilities
of photography, continuously upgrading his equipment—a classic case of
learning by doing. At first, he paid little attention to the history of
the medium: “I didn’t want to investigate other photographers, because
I was afraid I would be far too influenced by them before I had a
chance to develop my own style.” He finally attended a photography
program in 2012 because he felt he’d reached his own limits and wanted
some professional feedback to his work.
He hit upon one of his
favorite stylistic methods entirely by accident. “In the menu of my
camera, I discovered “double exposure” and tried it out and thought it
was an exciting effect.” Since then, he has gone on to perfect his work
with this tool. Whether Balcazar floats a huge hand over a street or
merges a portrait of a young woman with a photograph of a forest—the
double exposures lend his pictures an unreal, somewhat melancholy
atmosphere.
The work awarded by the MACHT KUNST jury is also a double exposure, combining his preferred themes of people and architecture. He was walking through the Hafencity
in Hamburg with a friend and photographed him against the light. The
young man in a baseball cap appears in silhouette before a blazing
white sky. Balcazar then combined this motif with a picture of a
building’s façade. Although it wasn’t made with this intention, the
image immediately calls to mind the lives of youths in the towering
residential projects of urban peripheries—and how architecture leaves
its mark on the lives of its inhabitants.
In his exhibition 15.000 t
in the Studio of Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Balcazar uses another
technique to distort his images. A large-scale work hangs on the front
wall of the space: a gigantic technoid object hovers at the edge of a
slag pit. The sheer size of this aggressive science fiction machine
shrinks a lonely human figure to the size of an insect. But it’s pure
fiction one sees here: Balcazar mirrored an image of a shovel dredger,
a trick that makes the steel giant appear to float, while at the same
time the resulting symmetry underscores the machine’s aesthetic effect.
The ambivalence of Balcazar’s recent photographs of the brown coal mines in South Welzow
in the Niederlausitz is what makes them interesting. He shows the
destruction of the landscape, but most of all he expresses his
fascination for the steel constructions in use here, for instance the
15,000-ton F60 that lends this show its title. This machine—the largest
movable machine worldwide—is both a technological marvel and a
monstrosity. This is also present in the titles of the works: Sahaquiel and Gaghiel are the names of the destructive angels in the Japanese TV Anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which Balcazar loved to watch in Peru.
Balcazar
sees the award and the exhibition connected to it as a confirmation
that photography is far more for him than just the refined hobby of an
aspiring scientist. And so he expands his horizons in both areas: as a
bioinformatician he is planning his doctorate, and as a traveling
photographer he already has his next destination in view—a stretch of
coast in Bangladesh where wrecked ocean-liners are dissembled by hand
into their individual components.
Achim Drucks
Nicolas Balcazar – 15.000 t
January 10 – January 26, 2014
Studio of the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin
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