Christian Bazant Hegemark in his Studio
It took a wedding to lure us back to vienna after eight years of absence. Christian’s hospitality was overwhelming and the fun it is to take his portrait didn’t change either.
Trauma (the book)
Today I received TRAUMA, a beautiful and very personal gift from Austrian painter Christian Bazant-Hegemark, for which I am deeply grateful. The volume spans fifteen years and tells the story of searching for a visual language dealing with trauma.
I was surprised how many of the paintings and drawings I still knew from my time in Vienna, some of which even appear in portraits I took in 2013.
The Tricycle
A week or so ago Christian Bazant-Hegemark said he had an idea for a picture involving himself, a children’s trike and one of his paintings. Was I interested in helping him shoot it? Of course I was – he is very easy in front of my camera and I knew it was going to be fun.
He wanted to combine a photo of himself with a painting he is currently working on. The painting shows a boy on a children’s tricycle and my job was to place Christian so that his position would resemble the trike-boy’s as much as possible and at the same time keep the background relatively easy to edit out.
In the words of Douglas Reynholm: I am no Truman Capote when it comes to Photoshop and I am excited about what Christian is going to do with it, but what I pictured while shooting was something like this:
It goes without saying that Christian riding an imaginary tricycle whilst resting his feet on a broom and sitting on a bar stool that was itself placed on a table was also calling for a more serious portrait.