Philipp Schaefer’s first camera arrived when he was about eight years old: a Ricoh point-and-shoot. Photography returned again in his teens, when his father gave him a Canon AE-1 Program.
His answers to Developing Stories are concise, but a few ideas carry unusual weight. Asked what he photographs most often, his answer is a single word: faces.
Faces first
Schaefer is currently documenting family, travel and urban spaces. He does not point to one decisive roll or image as the centre of his archive. Instead, what matters is whether the photograph becomes something he finds beautiful enough to keep returning to.
The materialization of a wink
Film, for him, offers something that an immediate digital image cannot.
“Only film can give me the materialization of a wink, the painting of a moment as a negative. Digital just gives me code.”
The phrase describes photography as a transformation from gesture into object. A glance, a face or a fraction of a second becomes a piece of material that can be held, developed, printed and revisited.
From negative to reversal
That interest in the physical image is also taking him toward colour reversal film. Unlike a negative, the developed transparency already contains the positive image. It makes the photograph itself feel even closer to an object rather than an intermediate file.
Looking closer
Schaefer’s next area of curiosity is macro photography. It is a different scale from the faces, family scenes and urban spaces he usually photographs, but it continues the same basic impulse: using the camera to turn something fleeting or easily overlooked into something that remains.
For Schaefer, analogue photography matters because a moment does not remain abstract. It becomes physical.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
