New home for Iveta Jaslová

Four month ago we visited the family of Iveta Jaslová in Usti Nad Labem in the Czech Republic. They were forced to leave the building they had lived in. The owner evicted the people – most of them Roma – by cutting off the water and electricity supply. Luckily the lawyer of Iveta found a new flat for the family. Now she lives in a better neighborhood in which not only Roma but also Czech and Vietnamese people are living. She pays much less rent then before and the apartment is in a way better condition.

JasloviUstiNadLabem

Friday-Project: Senegal Artisan Portraits

Florian and I are still in Africa, participating the Amsterdam Dakar challenge. We just arrived in Dakar and had a day off yesterday.

We used the time to start shooting a portrait series about craftsmen working along the streets or in their little shops.

Today we will head on towards The Gambia where our car will be auctioned to support a health-care project.

Here the foundations website: http://www.kambengo.nl

Omar Faye, 19, Mechanic

Ousman Sarr, 20, Engine fitter

Ada Faye, 15, Painter

Lale Seck, 23, Butcher

Mamadou Nihllo, 22, Car-cleaner

Djeneba Beyei, 40, melon-dealer

Daouda Faye, 25, Car-mechanic

Mamadou Diallo, 31, Tailor

Friday-Project: Amsterdam Dakar Challenge

Together with Julius, I’m doing a rally from Amsterdam to Dakar at the moment. After Dakar we will head on to Gambia where our car will be auctioned. The winst will be donated to a humanitarian Organasation in Gambia. At the moment we are in eastern Marocco at the edge to the Sahara. We have constant problems with our car, but so far we were always able to fix the problem. We hope to reach Banjul, the Gambian capital, by the 26th of november. After that the Friday-project will continue as usual.

emerge book

The guys from emerge-mag.com have just published their first book. We are very happy to be part of it with two stories of Kollektiv25 members.

The book covers 276 pages with reportages from 26 German photographers such as Christian Pankratz, Gesche Jäger, Daniel Pilar, Anne Lass, Nicole Strasser, Lene Münch, Mareike Günsche, Jan Windszus, Frederic Lezmi, Anikka Bauer, Tine Casper, Daniel Etter, Mischa Christen, Kirill Golovchenko, Hannes Jung, Heinrich Völkel, Jan Brandes, Gordon Welters, Florian Manz, Judith Stenneken, Rebecca Sampson, Jonas Ludwig Walter, Andy Spyra, Dawin Meckel, Anna-Kristina Bauer and Felix Seuffert.






The book can be ordered here:
emerge 011 – Young Photojournalism and Documentary Photography
20 x 25 cm
Softcover
Language: German
229 Color- und B/W-images
276 pages

ISBN 978-3-00-036295-8
39€ + shipping

The Beatsteaks

For the german daily »Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung« (FAZ) i spent one day with the german rock band »The Beatsteaks«. I was just heading to another job as the editor called me saying it was cancelled and i should portray the Beatsteaks instead. I had seen the band performing at the Hurricane festival a couple of years ago but i could neither remember how many of them stood on stage nor in which language they sang.

I thought of crazy, wild rock n‘ roll life. I pictured myself right in it.

The Beatsteaks didn’t fit in that cliche. Instead of Jack Daniels, loud music and hot groupies i found very clean tour buses, friends of the band members cooking delicious food and no liquor. The writer and i did an interview with Torsten Scholz, the bands bass player, a couple of hours before the gig. He was a very relaxed and sympathetic guy from berlin with some pretty colorful tattoos on his arms. After that the writer left and i stayed with the band until after the show. The only thing that fit into the rockstar life i expected was their manager taking care that the journalists wouldn’t harass the band members too much.
It has been a very interesting day.

Top 10 emerging photographers from Germany

Florian Manz, Lene Münch and Julius Schrank are three of the TOP TEN UNTER 30 emerging photographers from Germany selected by »flare« magazine.

The jury consisted of the gallery owner Robert Morat, the art director Matthias Ballmann, the photographer Sebastian Bolesch and a Representative of the photoeditors of Spiegel Online. To see the other 7 photographers who have been selected click here.



Exhibition »Explaining man to man«

»When I first became interested in photography… my idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself.« said Edward Steichen quite a while ago. Based on this credo of the famous photographer the photo exhibition at our University in Hanover got its title »explaining man to man«. The exhibition is meant as an anthology to report on the photo-journalistic work that originated here in the last ten years. Among the 63 works that are shown in the exhibition there are 5 reportages made by Kollektiv25-members.

Until April 8th 2011 the exhibition will be on display during the opening hours of the Design Center in Hanover.

The catalogue »Den Menschen den Menschen erklären« has been published by Rasch Verlag and can be ordered for 24 Euro, ISBN 978-3-89946-160-2.

Kollektiv25 joins Agency FOCUS

We’re happy to announce that all four of us have joined the german agency FOCUS. FOCUS has gained a lot of renommée for promoting photojournalism over the past 30 years and represents photographers such as Annie Leibovitz, David Burnett, Sebastião Salgado and agencies like Magnum and Contact Press in Germany.

We’re looking forward to a good cooperation and to make some pennies, too 😉
Our images are waiting to be licensed in the agency – go for it!


Photo- und Presseagentur FOCUS
Alter Fischmarkt 3
20457 Hamburg
GERMANY
www.agentur-focus.de
TEL +49 (0) 40 4502 23-0
FAX +49 (0) 40 4502 23-50

It felt a bit like being in a flying military museum

I did it for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) under NATO command is supplying aerial surveillance to NATO Headquarters. It has a base at Geilenkirchen/North Rhine-Westphalia.

That’s what it said in my assignement. I was told to be at the base at 7 a.m. to accompany one of their surveillance flights. That’s how I ended up flying to sicily and return without even having touched the ground.

The planes they are using remain from the time when germans still believed in the »evil-russian«. They are also used for major events such as World Cups. The engines on the planes are not being used in civilian air transportation because they’re too noisy and burn too much kerosene.

It felt a bit like being in a flying military museum. The technology is able to spot 400 planes in a circumcircle of 350 km. Regardless of the weather and the nature of the ground, because the high flying ferret aircrafts can look behind mountains which radar devices on the ground can not.

AWACS is an early warning system but it can also be used for purposes of attack. Such a machine can guide pursuit planes and missiles and spot defense installations from a save distance. One plane costs about 110 million euros, at Geilenkirchen there are based 16 of them.

Florian in Frankfurt

I’ve started my internship at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) one of the biggest daily newspapers in Germany. Till march of 2011 I’ll be working for them.
My first thrilling publication was a computerized trashcan :-).

TV story on german channel NDR

It’s been a little while since the german channel NDR did a story on me and my story »The last remaining farmer of Hanover«. It is still available here (sorry, the link is not available anymore). The good thing is that you get to see a little bit of Hermann Völxen in action.

Florian and Julius just finished their assignment for »GEO Saison«

A couple of days ago, Florian and Julius came back from their assignment for the German travel-magazine »GEO Saison«.
They’ve spent around 9 days photographing in southern France.

»We definitely had a good time down there, eventhough the metier of travel-photography was very new to us. Usually as a photojournalist you are focused on things that doesn’t work too well in our society. Most likely you are telling stories of problems, issues and difficulties.
So sometimes it was strange for us to always look out for the beautiful things around us. But we are very satisfied with the result and we definitely acquired a taste for the metier of travel-photography!«

The photos will most likely be published in the February issue next year.

Catalogue of the 2nd Lumix-Festival

We are happy, that we were part of the exhibitions at the 2nd Lumix-Festival for young photojournalism in Hanover. For those who couldn’t come to Hannover to see the exhibitions, or for those who were there and would like to have a souvenir to remember all the great works, there are good news: A catalogue with extracts of each reportage, that has been exhibited + all information about the photographers has been published.

In case you missed to buy one at the Festival, you can now get the catalogue for 20 Euros at the Bookshop in the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg or you can order it via email: bookshop@deichtorhallen.de

The countdown of the »2nd Lumix festival for young fotojournalism« is on!

Next week on Wednesday the 16th, the »2nd Lumix festival for young photojournalism« will start in Hanover!
Today the official festival newspaper was released. The cover of the 14 000 copies shows a portrait of Hermann Völxen, the protagonist of Florians story »The last remaining farmer in Hanover« which will be exhibited at the festival.

Meeting in Berlin!

It’s already a few days ago, but we still want to show you some photos of our meeting at the beginning of this month in Berlin.

On May first, we went to the big demonstration of right-wing extremists to cover the event. There were around 700 fascists trying to walk through Berlin, but got stopped after a few hundred meters by an enormous amount of counter-demonstrators blocking the streets.
At the demonstration we found ourselves between hundreds of photographers, journalists and film-teams. It felt as if there were at least two press-members
for every demonstrator. Anyways, it was nice being »on assignment« with the whole collective.

Lumix Festival for Young Phojournalism

Three members of Kollektiv25 are nominated for the FreeLens-Award 2010.
The nominated reportages will be exhibited at the Lumix – Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany from june 16th to 20th 2010.

Florian Manz with »The last remaining farmer in Hanover«
Lucas Wahl with »Kathmandu – City of Kings«
Lene Münch with »The Secret World of Fraternities«

Website of the Lumix – Festival for young photojournalism
Or watch the trailer.

»The last remaining farmer in Hanover« by Florian Manz
»Kathmandu – City of Kings« by Lucas Wahl
»The secret world of Fraternities« by Lene Münch

German photo-magazine refers to Kollektiv25

The german photo-magazine »Profifoto« reports on our collective. On page six of the newest issue you can find an introduction of our characters and you get an idea of our philosophy.

Next to that, we had some other online-publications in the last weeks. Here is a list with links, refering to photos and interviews of us.

Flare – Magazin für junge Fotografie
Augenblicke – Fotomagazin
Photo Presse – Online News
Urbanshit – Blog für StreetArt und urbane Kultur
fotoMagazin – Online Magazin

We are Kollektiv25

After three and a half months of planning, long discussions, 16 hours of skype conferences and a snowy weekend in Hannover, it’s finally done: our website is online! Of course we are very curious about getting feedback, recommendations or critics. Feel free to leave a comment or contact us at mail (bei) kollektiv25 [punkt] de. If you’re interested in Kollektiv25, become our fan on facebook, follow us on twitter or stay updated about our newest projects via RSS Feed.

A very special thanks goes to Timo Höner who spent way too much of his precious time designing and programming everything for us! Timo, you did a great job!
Enjoy and spread the news!