The alleys of Bern’s Old Town have a unique, muted light. The towering sandstone façades from the 15th and 16th centuries cast long shadows, creating a world between day and night. Being in the alleys of Bern’s Old Town means strolling through a living museum where every cobblestone, every oriel window, and every fountain tells a story. It is a place of silence in the heart of the city, a journey into the past that can be felt with every step.
Albert Einstein lived here and developed his theory of relativity, and in the summer, tourists from all over the world crowd in front of the Zytglogge clock tower. And you never know what awaits you around the next corner—it pays to be alert and ready when a unique opportunity for an original picture presents itself.
For me, photographing in Bern means photographing home. That might sound trivial, but in reality, it is a difficult, even torturous task. Precisely because you think you know everything, much of it seems too ordinary, too uninteresting for a photograph. Familiarity has dulled the senses; we are too close to the things that seem so familiar to us. Only with conscious alertness do we recognize, in our well-known surroundings, the moments that truly matter—those fractions of a second in which the flowing forms of a scene come together into a composition that captivates the eye, the emotion, and the mind of the viewer alike.
The effort to capture these moments right on our own doorstep is rewarded with a surprising discovery: the exoticism of home. The streets we ran through as children transform, through the distanced view of the camera’s viewfinder, into a new world. Photographing at home even becomes a special experience. Walking through the same alleys and squares year after year sharpens the senses for the smallest changes. The backdrop is fixed, set in stone, but everything else changes: the people, their fashion, the window displays, and, of course, the ever-shifting light.
Tied to a static place, we are more exposed to the flow of time than on a journey, where new impressions constantly overwhelm us. I took these pictures with a Leica M6 on Kodak Tri-X film around the turn of the millennium. Today, a quarter of a century later, they already radiate an almost nostalgic atmosphere, as if from a bygone era. Just like the analog camera I used to take them—digital photography was still a distant dream at the time.
