dicking around

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Christoph Rehage

l’art pour l’art

Walking with the weirdo was fun. She was into art, and so the daily self portrait turned into an even more complicated matter than it already was. We experimented with long exposures and connected sequences. We took the same pictures over and over again, trying to get them just right. It took a lot of time, but it was all for the sake of art. “L’art pour l’art”, as they said in France.

The reactions to my video The Longest Way 1.0 – 350 days of hiking through China – TIMELAPSE back in 2009 had come as a surprise to me. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t expected anyone to enjoy the video. It was a good little film. But millions of views and tens of thousands of comments later I was still baffled.

the new video

Looking back there were a few things about the old video that I thought I could have done differently. And so now, ever since that first day of walking from the Chinese/Kazakh border at Khorgas back in the summer of 2016, I had been taking portraits of myself.

I had learned to use a bounce flash for my portraits while staying in a pink hostel in Almaty a month or so later.

And by now, some 7+ years later, I had accumulated thousands upon thousands of pictures.

darkness

Aaaaanyway the weirdo and I spent so much time taking our pictures that it got dark. This seemed to happen on a regular basis when we were walking. We referred to it as dicking around.

And after nightfall, when we were walking through a mosquito-infested forest next to the Rhine, in the light of our head torches, one of which was red, we decided to dick around some more.

L’art pour l’art.