“If you go and photograph a beggar, it makes a huge difference whether you stand in front of the beggar—the same thing is true for children—if you stand in front of them, and point your camera down, or whether you physically go down on your knees, and try and see the world through their eyes, from their perspective. It makes a different picture. Your picture is determined by your physical point of view. But your physical point of view is also the result of your emotional relationship to that person, to that beggar, to that child, which in turn can be the result of your life perspective. So sometimes when asked ‘what’s the exposure of your image’ a photographer, a photojournalist would say, well it’s a 125th of a second, and in my case 60 years. Because in a great image, ideally your whole life perspective comes and culminates in that image. Flows into it.” - Gerd Ludwig
Photograph Courtesy of Gerd Ludwig
This podcast was recorded on Wednesday November 20th, 2007 at the home of Greg Gorman in Los Angeles, Calfornia. Gerd sits down with George to have a conversation about working with National Geographic on many interesting and diverse assignments. We discuss how he photographed inside the Chernobyl reactor, about the victims, the environment, and many other aspects that particular assignment. After that we delve deeper into his early cross country road trips photographing in Europe and India, and how his education with Otto Steinert played a key role in his photographic perspective today.
This “video” podcast includes photographs by Gerd Ludwig. It can be viewed by downloading it directly into iTunes (if you are accessing it by subscribing via the Music Store), or by copying it into iTunes on either a Mac or a PC (if you’ve downloaded it from my iDisk). Once copied into iTunes, it can be transferred to a Video iPod, and viewed that way as well.
Finally, it’s possible that only the audio track will be heard on devices other than Apple Video iPods (depending upon their MPEG4 compatibility), and the photographs will not be seen.
Duration: 43:59
The podcast can be downloaded from my iDisk at:
http://idisk.mac.com/george_jardine-Public?view=web
This podcast is labeled “20071120 Podcast - Gerd Ludwig” in the Public directory.
Or, it can be found on iTunes (in a day or two) by searching under Podcasts for “Lightroom”. The RSS feed is:
http://rss.adobe.com/www/special/light_room.rss
