In the beginning was the place.
DIRECTED Magazine 2006
It's an old problem. Over time, location scouts, like all people, develop routines and viewing habits which are detached from the story context of the films they work on. Turning this effect the other way around, it could be interesting to develop film scenes – staying away from all the usual clichés – from specific locations.
What happens when photographers with an independent view, and away from production constraints, go location-scouting? That's the issue that "Directed" is addressing in the form of a long photo-essay.
This issue's guest artist is Berlin photographer Birgit Richter. In her work for the radical photography journal Babel, you see images of common places, captured with a look that is, at the same time, distant and precise. "I always take the same photograph, actually – places that get normally overlooked because we don't want to concede them originality. But when you take your time and look close enough – everything is original."
In 2006, Birgit Richter was invited to spend three months in Los Angeles, where she would photograph freeways, wastelands, industrial areas, and gas stations.
Richter: "I like forbidden territories for my pictures – I climb walls and fences in order to satisfy my curiosity. And as I get rewarded with new photographs, I also keep the imaginary stories that all those places put in my head. Before flying to Los Angeles, the only places I knew I wanted to photograph were Zabriskie Point and Fritz Lang's star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. All the other images are the result of my aimless wandering of cities, deserts, and wastelands."
—Max Dax
Birgit Richter lives and works in Berlin. A photographer and editor for Babel magazine, her work has been exhibited in the Ruhrlandmuseum in Essen, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin, – during the exhibition "About Beauty" in collaboration with Babel and H. P. Feldmann – and at the Fotoschau Cottbus. Her photographs have been published, among others, in Directed, Berliner Journalisten, Verdi Kunst und Kultur, BE Magazin, Der Sanitäter, and Babel Fotoillustrierte.