illex welcomes German photographer Benni Pause. Benni is now studying psychology in Hungary, and his photography is influenced both by his travels and his academic study. Benni creates beautiful images with focused and careful consideration.
Please enjoy his work and his interview :) 
untitled 
Picturesque My Heart #11 
untitled, from the series “..” 
Picturesque My Heart #3
In your photographs you often feature a strong compositional element anchored in the center of the frame, such as the photograph above of the house in the snow. Tell us why you are attracted to such compositions and how you created this particular photograph.
The composition of this photo and of others is influenced by a few things. Since I started to take analog pictures with medium format cameras, I was always interested in the square frames which give me a certain range but also a strong limitation in structuring a picture. Putting things in the middle of a picture is of course connected to my interpretation of a scene. The central placement emphasizes the objects I’m interested in. For me it’s about giving a picture kind of compositional balance.
Another thing that developed my way of composing pictures and centering objects in a frame came through my psychological studies. The issue of perception has been a psychological theme over the last century. The question of how we can get a three-dimensional impression of the world out of a two-dimensional physical input on our retina. It’s more than just the transformed information of light coming across neurons. This visual information of the physical world is transformed, analyzed, and processed in our mind in unique individual ways. It is a question between physiological processes and the subjective impression we get from what we see.
I read a lot about picture memory. I am interested in topics like colour and structure and evolutionary categories which are important for the meaning and interpretation of an image. The picture of this house was taken last winter in southern Germany, when I drove in my car along some snowy roads. It is a kind of mixture between a natural scene, like a horizon, and a “man-made” scene like this house. You can understand the essence of this scene even if you only see the thumbnail in the size of 30x30 pixels. This is connected to our enormously huge picture memory. I am still very interested in these topics. So I think a lot of my photographs are more influenced by things I read, which are not directly connected to the topic of “photography.”
In “Picturesque My Heart #11” you’ve shown us a scene of architectural lines interacting with lines of light. What were the steps that led to the composition of this photo?
The picture was taken in Salvador, Brazil. I like the combination and the contrast between the moving, warm light which crosses those simple architectural, static, and hard lines to make the scene more beautiful for me. Because I lived there for some time, I had time to see the place at different times during the day and night.
In your series “..” you capture objects suspended in air. Can you tell us about the genesis of this series? Do the items themselves, which include clothing, containers, and electronics, have particular artistic significance for you?
I was quite bored of my surroundings and the place I lived the time I started to take this series. My environment became more and more interesting for me as I took things that surrounded me in my normal life and put them out of their original places. Because I love analogue photography, it always takes many tries before I get the picture. If I used Photoshop to manipulate these pictures, it would lose the connection between the film and the objects. Like I mentioned before, there are a lot of interpretations and motivational aspects important for what we see. Everyone has a prediction, an expectation about situations and circumstances which are influenced by experiences or laws of nature. The objects which seem not to be influenced by gravity create an absurd situation which make them more recognizable than in their normal surroundings or in their existential orientation. The objects themselves have a more personal meaning than a general artistic significance for me.
Your photography depicts scenes from all over the world. Your photo “Picturesque My Heart #3” shows a scene from the country of Brazil. You’ve also been to Thailand, China, Latvia, Romania, South Africa, New Zealand, and you’re now in Hungary. How have your experiences been to photograph in these different countries?
My experiences have all been really positive. At the end of my world trip I was quite afraid that my backpack could be stolen or gets lost within all my film (and months of carrying them around the world). But after three months of traveling I was lucky when I met a photographer from Switzerland who took some rolls of mine back to Europe. I think the difference for me lies more in the way you travel than in the countries themselves. You can travel and have your camera just with you or you can travel to take photos. You don’t get the same impressions of a country or a place when you are too focused on frames. I saw so many interesting places but I didn’t have the time to explore them enough to take a photo. To other places I went, I was really focused on taking pictures and getting the mood or my interpretation of this situation which obviously takes more time. For me it’s about creating a personal timeless memory of places I’ve travelled to. I always return to this situation, when I see the pictures.
please visit Benni’s Flickr for more thoughtful and beautiful photographs.
