Paul Pietrek grew up close to photography. His parents were photographers and gave him a DSLR as a teenager, but a few years later he asked to use his father’s Canon AE-1. The move toward film carried a small element of rebellion: while his parents were shooting digitally, he wanted to work with something slower and less immediate.
That choice became a long-running practice built around experimentation, friends, neighbourhood life and the pleasure of not knowing exactly what will return from the lab.
Shopping trolleys, hairlines, dogs and home
Pietrek’s list of recurring subjects is wonderfully specific: shopping trolleys, hairlines, necks, dogs, his neighbourhood, friends and family.
The subjects suggest a photographer less interested in monumental scenes than in fragments—things that become noticeable because a camera isolates them from ordinary life. Around Leopoldplatz, that attention becomes a loose visual diary of the neighbourhood he shares with his roommate and friend Eric Feldmann.
Seven years of photographing alongside someone
Pietrek and Feldmann met on the first day of university roughly seven years ago. Since then, analogue photography has been part of their friendship. They have shared cameras, tested films, photographed one another and talked continuously about process.
During a semester abroad they entered a particularly intense black-and-white phase because they had access to a darkroom and enlarger. Printing together made the collaboration physical: the shared photographic journey extended beyond exposing film into deciding what an image should become on paper.
Living together now means they can photograph the same neighbourhood while developing very different personal views of it.
They can photograph the same neighbourhood while developing very different personal views of it.
The limitation that creates abundance
Pietrek likes the finite length of a roll, but he is equally attracted to ways of bending that limitation. He experiments with different stocks, overexposure and daylight flash. Flea-market cameras create another source of excitement because each one suggests a slightly different way of working.
In recent years, large quantities of 35mm cinema film have changed the rhythm again. Evenings spent with friends cutting film and bulk-loading canisters create the feeling of having almost unlimited film available. Paradoxically, analogue photography becomes more abundant precisely because the group is physically making the supply themselves.
Waiting makes forgotten photographs possible
Pietrek often lets exposed rolls accumulate before developing them together. By then, some frames have nearly disappeared from memory.
The contact with the images therefore contains real surprise. A moment that seemed unimportant while shooting can become the exciting frame; something expected to work may not. Waiting breaks the direct relationship between intention and judgment and lets photographs return almost as discoveries.
Becoming more social in the street
The next challenge is not technical. Pietrek wants to become more proactive with street photography, particularly with faces. He wants to move closer, photograph people and become less afraid of the social interaction that may follow.
His deliberately provocative formulation is to take the picture and ask forgiveness afterward. Beneath the joke is a genuine ambition: stop allowing hesitation to decide which encounters become photographs.
Grain over pixels
When asked what he wants the final story to communicate about his relationship with film, Pietrek reduces seven years of cameras, shared darkrooms, bulk-loaded cinema stock and neighbourhood wandering to three words: “Grain over pixels.”
Grain over pixels.
The phrase works because the preference is not simply visual. Grain represents the whole process around it—the camera found at a flea market, the roll cut with friends, the wait, the forgotten frame and the possibility that photography will return something he did not know he had made.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
