004~ The first time the project's concept revealed itself to me!
The first visual concept of this Photo-Project came to me, when I wasn't ready for it, even before I understood that I found my mechanism to deal with my troubled mind. It occurred while I was following Paul down the U-Bahn, heading for the Zoo Station. This epiphany was merely an associative pun, a dumb distortion of the most mundane sign laying right down before my feet, and really, all it did was give me a short break from the heavy-pensive noise in my head which I was trying to rationalize, in order to make sense out of it all, because this was a very strange sensation I was experiencing. I've traveled to over 50 counties during my backpacking days, this country sure felt different!
Anyway - I took 2 cameras with me, that day, and as I was looking down I saw the escalator silver platform, and there it was - The famous Oscar winning Feature film: Schindlers Lifts! :D Finally a little grin! I pulled the camera out and shot, what would later become my first image of this project.
Sketch by Allon Zaslansky
It just made me smile. a most needed one for that matter. It felt so good-to smile again, it felt like I haven't smiled for years, how crazy does that sound! But never mind that... - the important thing was that it immediately gave me the shred of the confidence to start looking up and around and not just old people...rather - I was seeing the young ones.
We always used humor in our family.
And I am not PROUD of it, I am just saying it for what it is.
For example, when my brother first told me circa 2004 that they were leaving for Germany, the first thing I said, of all things I could have said or asked was "Well, bro, if theres a German Shepard standing by a soldier in the train station, rather take the bus."
...as I turned away from him and went on I immediately thought to my self, what a stupid strange thing to say. But funny!
Funny enough to chocolate-coat the fact he was leaving.
I knew this approach would be key for me to be able and continue digging deeper into various facets, reading into stories I knew, some I've read or heard about.
I began searching for the perfect Schindler Lifts logo and platform, reshooting this in different locations, each with its own problems. sometimes it was the state of the platform, sometimes the light, rarely the location. my biggest problem was the constant 'shake' of the platform preventing me from attaining a crystal sharp Photograph. Eventually, a miracle occurred to me, in a train station in Tel Aviv, as I finished my set up, and had no idea how to solve this platform shake once again, a maintenance guy, came over, pulled out a key and as he pushes it into some secret socket on the staircase, he apologizes TO ME, that he has to turn of the escalator for a while, and if I want to go down with the tripod, than he will wait...I said wait no longer! he stopped the staircase for a few minutes to full shut down, and gave me all the time I needed and more to capture this image. I loved everything about this set-up, solutions come in mysterious ways.
Schindler's Lifts by Allon Zaslansky
I loved the dry seed, the rather clean-newish state of the platform, those black and grey and white stripes seem to be a far stretch...but it's there doc. it's there..., everything came out so sharp! And to top it all up- unlike the usually hard super contrast light we tend to experience, in this roofless train station, sun can be harsh, but on that day, the light was nice and soft.
A Perfect day to start seeing things differently, and I like the result of my first photograph.