O.I.F. (Movie Locations) by Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber 2003

O.i.F (Original in Farbe)
b/w laser-print
60 pages, 58 images
21 x 28 cm
Ed. 32/35 incl. c-type print
More info zu O.i.F. here: Please copy and paste.

https://boehmkobayashi.de/o-i-f-movie-locations/

and here:

https://oliversieber.de/index.php/2021/01/19/oif/

Book Countdown #8

Dear friends, once again it’s Sunday, once again a publication from us.

O.i.F. (Movie Locations) – Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber 2003

Being on the road together is pretty nice. The people at bus stops in Los Angeles, photographed by Anthony Hernandez, might see it differently.
Unlike them, we had a car and drove all over Los Angeles just to have breakfast where Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater did in True Romance.

“Are they allowed to do that?” Peter Hein shouts from the stage during a concert. A concert around their first album Monarchie und Alltag, as part of the Lieblingsplatte Festival. The record was released in 1980.
He probably means: Are we allowed to do that? Do we want to?

When did the world become colorful? Can you really sell your smile? And who owns time?
Kids is one of my favorite books. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Their shared life at the beginning of their careers in New York.
America was very present in films. These films shaped our image of America. At least the ones we saw. Mostly dubbed into German. Strange, when Robert De Niro talked about laundry detergent on the radio.
Image and text. Two tracks.
In 1996 we went to New York for the first time. Up early, straight over to Brooklyn, to get an impression of the place under the Manhattan Bridge where the poster for "Once Upon a Time in America" was photographed.
We stayed at Hotel 17. Madonna had just finished filming.
We were calling for taxis, and John Lurie and Annie Leibovitz were trying their luck as well. Morning on Broadway: the goblin. Willem Dafoe. We smiled at each other. Otherwise, no one was on the street. Katja had left her Olympus mju somewhere, but we never found it again. Unlike in Tokyo, where the same thing happened — there it was still there.
Katja photographs with 35 mm, and I with large format. My Busch Pressman made it back from Düsseldorf to America. It originally probably belonged to a photographer at the White House.
At the beginning of 2000, we set off for California to get to know the other side as well.
The title of the work is O.i.F. (Original in Color). Incomprehensible to a good friend and supporter: Olivier Cablat.
Olivier and Sebastian Hau always had the coolest places and brought together exciting people in Arles. Thank you both!
Fehlfarben was the band with Peter Hein. I had forgotten to write that earlier.

When did the world become colorful? While ChatGPT loses itself in platitudes and cliché notions of photography, I prefer to think of Calvin and Hobbes:

“Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
Really?
Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
That’s really weird.
Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
But then why are old paintings in color?! If their world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?”

(Bill Watterson: Calvin & Hobbes, Warner Books)

In an earlier issue, #17 and #17b of our Böhm Zines, we made photographs by announcement. We were interested in the tourist gaze. We told friends and subscribers in advance what we would photograph in America. In the end, it turned out differently. Traveling to film locations came close to a dérive. At the time, it also wasn’t that easy to research these places. #17b was a collector’s nightmare. For 5 Deutsche Mark, 35 different compilations of small prints.

Our works often move between wall and book. The portfolio itself can be on the move. Perhaps the book is the more honest space: less authoritarian than the wall, less fleeting than the screen. Feeling the paper, pressing the photo corners back down because the print is alive. Kitschy? Maybe.

With this email, our somewhat more extensive zine is in focus: #20b. A fluffy white title, flocked. Rub-ons underneath. Two-color Chromolux as the cover, the matte red side on the outside. Handcrafted. Beneath the images are the titles of some of the films shot there. Not all of them appealed to us.

Our first joint authorship.
Printed with a digital black-and-white printer belonging to an old friend. Thin paper, fine screen. Normally we only printed 12 pages. This time it was 60 pages — that was too much for us, and we looked for another solution. Thank you, Ute.
Perhaps that’s where we discovered our love for halftone screens.
Originally, it was only supposed to remain black and white for this publication. Later, in 2009, we did decide on a portfolio with color prints after all.

Big cut.

“Are they allowed to do that?” Asked again. The beautiful and the horrible in one breath?
I do that all the time. My brain does. Everything exists side by side and fights for attention.
Right now, I’m finding it a bit difficult. I would like to write more about how happy we were that Anna Planas and Fanny Escoulen invited us to curate the Aperture/Paris Photo evening at Silencio. With our film, which was shown in the club’s cinema.
Edited scenes from places we had been but had not photographed. Over two hours. Thanks to Katja’s patience. Axel Ganz, an eager participant in the Festival of the Retold Film, contributed a composition. After Bernard Herrmann. On his harmonium. Thank you, Axel.
For the occasion, a new edition of O.i.F.
Six floors beneath Paris.
Thomas Klein a.k.a. Sølyst followed our invitation to play a concert. Thank you, Thomas. We were looking forward to it.
Instead of more people arriving, some leave the club again. Look at their phones. Are somewhere else. An unusual situation.
Paris, David Lynch, photography, O.i.F., this evening of November 13, 2015 — somehow it all belongs together now. And it changed us. Like so many.

We still have one copy of the red first edition #20b. It is #32/35, published with a C-print on Kodak Endura, printed by me at the time for the exhibition “Frau Böhm – Our Film” at the Goethe-Institut Rotterdam in 2004 during the film festival. The motif is the Vagabond Inn. That’s where Thelma and Louise picked up Brad Pitt.
The bleached-blond Takeshi Kitano as “Zatoichi” was sitting right in front of us.