003. Caro & Erik Estrada
Professional photographers from Austria and Indonesia, founders of Estrada Photography in Vienna.
I have been curious about how you work as a team, because you have a company together for artistic and commercial projects, Estrada Photography. How is your work process when you work together on your projects?
E: Mostly we do it together, sometimes she takes the photos and I do the retouching and the processing of the images, she gives me input how it should be, what is needed to finish it.
C: He means he does the difficult work, he is so sweet (laughs). Most of the time we work as a team, so we take the photos together, and most of the time he then does the processing of the images. He’s more into retouching fashion and portrait photos and I’m more into the product shots.
You work with fashion, brands and product images, also with film. Do you select which customers you bring in that fits your company identity?
C: We usually work with a handful of customers who we already know. They somehow emerge from our personal surroundings. We don’t really select the customers. Although there are some big companies I would refuse to work for, for ethical reasons.
For example, I was once asked to take photos for an Austrian company which is very successful worldwide for their invention of adding antibiotics to animal feed as an everyday nutrition, for production animals for intensive mass animal farming; I refused to work for them. That is one of the reasons why I have a second job now. I also work as an art teacher which makes me artistically and financially more independent.
Our customers are mainly small companies, they are our main target. We work together on our commercial jobs and we both do our own artistic work. But our last exhibition we made together and merged in the same way. We also added found footage, so it was all mixed up. You could not really see “is it mine, is it his or somebody else’s”, we tried to experiment with giving up our authorship.
What’s the reasoning behind giving up your authorship?
C: We just thought it was not that important. We wanted to create something else, something that mixes all the impressions that we had. During the selection process of the photos I chose some of Erik’s, he chose some of mine and we also kind of curated some found photos from the flea market, so in the end it all somehow became ours.
So what you leave behind for the viewer, who bears the final signature, is it Estrada Photography?
C: We signed each photo, so the one who took the photo is the first signature and the other person has the second signature (laughs). So yes we signed it in the end when we sold them, but also the person who buys it is part of the artistic work, because they chose it, they look at it, have their own imagination about it.
Can you explain the title of your last exhibition, Summer Romance?
C: We bought old picture frames from the flea market, chose some photos and combined them. The feeling we wanted to express was the romantic feeling of the summer, with a bit of melancholy. A kind of feeling that is getting more and more rare nowadays. We have less spare time, and less of summer. Usually you go for a travel and then you’re back at work again.
I bought this photo book of the Hungarian artist Bela Doka titled The Sundays of life. To me, the photos are somehow not so special but very intimate and the feeling that emerges to me from that book — the reason why I bought it — is like a strong feeling of “some hours of lazy summer time in the garden”…
Did you discuss about this summer feeling theme before the exhibition?
Both: No (laughs).
C: It was just summer and we wanted to do an exhibition, and something romantic. But we never talked about it (laughs).
Have you done the “found footage” concept before?
C: This was the first time we did it with photographs. Sometimes I use it for my films. I’m a bit disappointed that people only bought our photos and not the found footage-picutres. I liked those photos so much so I thought other people would appreciate them too and go for it.
I have one picture of an old lady standing around on my desktop, which was left from that exhibition, and I somehow built up a connection to it, even though it’s someone I never knew. I actually started to collect such photos. So whenever we buy old frames there are a lot of photos that comes with them. I keep the best of them.
Are you planning on any more exhibitions?
C: This summer we are travelling, but we would like to do it again next year. We will have time to collect new impressions and new photos. We need to find a place to exhibit also, we didn’t actively look for one yet.
Last time it was just by chance, very spontaneous, because the coffeeshop had just opened up. But we plan to sell our work on a winter-market in the same way, with found footage.
On the art side, are you trying to make a name for yourselves as photographers, or will future exhibitions and projects be spontaneous in the same way?
E: Taking photos for me is like a daily habit, an ongoing project. Whatever kind of photo I take on any given time, I look it over and over and it could be used for many things, for example a coffee-table book, it’s always ongoing.
C: He’s always taking photos, a 100%-photographer. Me, when I go to holidays or just in daily life, I never take any photos, only sometimes. I really need that point of inspiration, which doesn’t always happens. It happens every few years or so. When it happens I take a whole series of photos, for a book or so. That’s it. Mostly travelling inspires me. Sometimes I force myself to do it but I normally end up with a lot of photos that I don’t like for a long time.
Erik, could you describe the way you work, how do you choose your motifs?
E: Sometimes, I take photos of the same object over and over, like a continuity. It becomes like a series of objects then, when I look at them later. Mostly I shoot with an analogue camera, and if I have time I also process the photos myself.
How I choose changes every day. It depends on my mood, what kind of weather, how it feels. It can change rapidly, every second, every minute, it’s always completely different. I never know what will come or what I can expect, what I will find. It’s automatic what I find interesting at the moment. It just happens.
When I worked for an advertising agency in Indonesia I had to fulfill the wish of my clients, but I still had some room for my own creativity. I didn’t want to work only for the client, so if you look at the end product, you should also be able to see the creative work behind it.
You work with fashion photography, but when did you discover your artistic side?
E: Learning by doing, you could say. But I came into the commercial side through my interest in creative photography. Personal projects takes time and money, so I needed a “normal” work to fulfill my personal projects.
C: That’s very interesting, I never asked him that (laughs).
And you met each other in Indonesia, did it happen through your common interest in photography?
C: Yeah, I went there and I decided to leave my digital camera back home and take analogue photos with my Minolta camera. As usually when I travel, I also stuffed a lot of other things into my camera bag on top of my camera. And this time I had bought this book about a shaman from Bali (laughs). I never actually read that book, it’s still in the cupboard, all the way to Asia and back. The spiritual book didn’t do anything to me, but it broke my lens (laughs), it just broke off my camera…
I thought, oh my God, finally I’m in Indonesia, I wanted to take a lot of photos… so I asked God: “I know everything has a meaning in life, but what the fuck?!”. There was no sense in it, you know?
Photo: © Caro Estrada, Punan Adiu, Kalimantan, Indonesia, 2007.
I convinced some guy to bring me to a camera shop to buy a new lens. But they didn’t have any Minolta lenses, only Canon and Nikon. So I decided to buy a new analogue camera but they only had Canons for around 500 euro, it was too expensive for me.
Then there was a guy in the shop constantly smiling at me, and I thought: “okay, maybe he knows somebody who can sell me a cheaper camera”. He didn’t have any good cameras to sell, but when he visited another time he had a friend with him, and that was Erik. It was his best friend, and we started to become very good friends for over a year. After one year we found out that we liked each other and I couldn’t just go back to Europe without him.
Did you get any camera in the end?
I bought the expensive camera in the shop in the end and I’m very happy with it, it’s my favourite camera. I took the best photos of my life with it.
What are you going to do with the book then?
(both laughs) C: It’s still in the cupboard, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s a travel book from the National Geographic series called Ratu Pedanda, about this man from Bali, a priest or shaman who apparently healed a lot of people, apparently he did some magic on me without having read the book, so… (laughs).
Tell me more about the melancholia in your motifs.
C: Erik’s photos are very melancholic. I always feel that his photos are very sad.
E: It just happens to be that I feel that way sometimes, and then I take a photo.
Caro, in your photos there is often a sense of afterthought in how people are portrayed, sometimes they are sleeping or embracing each other. Does this have to do with that feeling you told me about earlier, that vanishing summer feeling in the garden?
C: Maybe, yeah. It could be something that I’m looking for. When I was a child the world around me was always much too fast. I tried to adapt to it and tried to manage my life… but there’s always a kind of sadness that there’s not more time to be together and enjoy spending time together, with my relatives, or with Erik. I always have this feeling that time is passing very fast.
When I find the time and inspiration to take photos I feel that kind of peace, like time is standing still. And those things I see, I wish to catch them, keep them and also to show that to other people. That’s also something that is in my video work. Apart from that, I meanwhile feel that some certain things are easier for me to tell with videos. Especially critical ideas and/or content.
So you can engage in your interest for social issues easier with video?
C: Before, I rarely used to talk about the problems I saw around me, and photography for me was like some kind of escape. Intuitively I was looking for situations and places where these problems did not exist. Some people see this stance with very critical eyes. They say I’m romanticising. But I do have a lot of critical thoughts in my mind and a strong feeling that I need to talk about them, but if I am to do that I need to use another medium. I tried it with photography but it doesn’t work for me.
Are you going to tell more stories with film? After your success with Schreibmaschinerie.
C: Yes, at the moment I really enjoy working with film as a medium, which is quite new to me. Mainly I like to do interviews and portrait people the way they are with their thoughts, feelings and wishes. That is something I really like, I feel that it is very important to listen to other people’s ideas, experiences and ways of thinking and to give them some space, some stage somehow. I find that very important.
Somehow it’s the same way how I tried to work with photography, but somehow it’s also totally different.
With Schreibmaschinerie then, how did it come to life?
C: I did it at the university. We were asked to do a work about our institute building. It used to be used as a storage for hand-typed data about WWI. I was fascinated about the idea, that this long time ago, there was already so much data being produced about the war. So the images that came up about the war started to become interesting. The distance from the work on the desktop, typing all that data, and what was really happening behind it, that’s the thing that interested me. That’s why I decided to use a typewriter to create little soldiers, and they look like they’re in some video game, but an analogue one.
So the distance between the fact of killing and being killed, the organization behind all armed conflicts up to this day, was what I tried to show.
I find the animation is genious in its simplicity. The massive sound of the typewriter when it strucks, sounds like machine guns. It all works so well together. Did you realize that during the work?
C: I found that out when I was typing. That it would work very well with the message. It’s also a bit like a heartbeat, tck tck - tck tck. The machinery, the mechanic and the technical inventions that were made during the WWI, which was the first technological war, all of those thing also interested me and came together in this inhuman sound.
With Erik, I feel that his medium really is the world of photography, while my medium kind of changed from photography to film. There was a change, a point from where I went to work nearly only with video. I tried a bit to do some more photographic work in Siberia when we were there for the film festival, but I found out that the medium where I can express myself better is video, at least at this moment I feel like that
Your next project will then be with video?
C: Yes, at the moment I’m working on a film with a friend of mine, and it’s about war again. It’s about the remains of a former concentration camp, in Neu Guntramsdorf, a bit outside of Vienna. It was a former Aussenlager of Mauthausen, nearby Vienna, not far from where SCS is standing now.
A lady rent that site to keep some sheep there. But the site is not dedicated as a memorial site. It is owned by the Eco Plus company which owns a lot of land in the industrial outskirts of Vienna.
It’s a 100% daughter company of the Land of Niederösterreich as far as I know. But they are still trying to sell that land — because land in the industrial area is usually very valuable — rather then dedicating it as a memorial site, which I think would be very interesting for educational means of mediation, especially because of its proximity to the city of Vienna. But until now they couldn’t sell it.
Luckily, potential buyers up to this day felt rejected by the fact of its history.
It’s very interesting. I shot some videos and made interviews with the lady and a guy from the church who initiated the memorial organization. He found out what happened on site by talking to the people there. The lady actually lost two relatives in another concentration camp. And the church guy told us in the interviews that his father was working for the Wehrmacht, although he had jewish roots. We also interviewed people from the village.
What I am trying to find out is not through an objective point of view, rather the personal stories, the individual connections to their past. The memories of memories of somebody. What will be left, what memories, what stays.
I took some nice shots of the woman keeping the sheep, where she is shouting strict orders to the dogs on the landscape. And some close-ups of the sheep chewing something and looking really crazy (laughs). So let’s see.
Erik, you work mostly with black-and-white photography?
E: I normally work only in B&W but recently I have started to work also with colour.
C: He used to take only B&W and me only in colour. Then we got inspired by each other, and when he started with colour I found they are really great. I started to try out B&W too but it didn’t turn out good.
E: And it’s still difficult for me to work in colours. The photos get a different feeling. When I look at them afterwards, something feels different. It distracts me more.
You want to do more exhibitions in the future?
E: Yes, and also solo exhibitions.
C: What about me?? (laughs)
E: You also have to do solo exhibitions. (laughs)
C: (to Erik) You should make a book!
I always try to convince him to make a book or exhibitions. He has so many great and artistic photos lying around.
E: Yes, probably the next project will be to make a book.
How do you feel about online presence in social forums and so on?
E: There is a really big Indonesian online photography platform, fotografer.net. It was big at it’s time but after Facebook and all the other social media coming it has become less and less people there. I don’t feel the need so much to go online with my work but rather try to motivate myself and make a book. Online presence is good for presenting your work for everybody, but to connect emotionally to my photos, real books in front of you are better for that, not in front of a screen.
C: He used to be part of the fotografer network , which was a really strong community, and the members also really met each other. They met each other from time to time to go “hunting” — that’s what they call it — for journalistic work or just to hang out and take photos together. They formed a strong friendship, a real network of photographers, even internationally. They always stayed in contact, all over the world. When Facebook came, all that got lost somehow, it dissolved. Lately they published a book, a limited edition. A kind of relic of the old times.
Watch more beautiful photos from Caro and Erik on their webpage Estrada Photography or visit their Facebook page.
Interview by Anders Khan Bolin @strayl1ght
