Interview with Bastian Hertel

One of our favorite things about doing interviews with a featured photographer each month is how much we learn from every single one of those talented street shooters. Bastian Hertel was no exception, in fact, I felt like I learned more in the hour we spent talking to him than I had in the past year.

Bastian’s own journey with street photography has been one spent asking questions and digging deeper, learning from other photographers at workshops or in more casual settings. Bastian confessed that sometimes, after a particularly intense workshop, he would feel “crushed,” unable to go on photographing and sometimes he would actually stop for a while. Eventually though, he always found his way back to photography, each time with his skill set more finely tuned and a refreshed perspective on his art.

Click on the audio player below to listen into our conversation with Bastian as he talks about the benefits of manual focus, finding your visual language, and many other profound points that just might change the way you shoot.

Bastian’s Photographic Influences

Robert Mertens
Alan Schaller
Bruce Gilden
The Becher Class especially Andreas Gursky
Michael Wolf

A Selection of Bastian’s Photos

Bastian Hertel

My name is Bastian Hertel and I was born in 1977 on Borkum, a small island in northern Germany. I live in Hamburg since 1996. I am married and have two daughters of school age. I am self-taught and dedicated to street photography since about 2012. My main focus lays on the placement of motifs in the urban environment. The exact arrangement of objects in compositions is a very personal thing for me. It reflects how I constantly search for and find my place in the world, my family, my city and in society in general. Since my photographic beginnings, I have always felt a deep satisfaction when I find a good composition and press the trigger, then take it home and edit it to a final image. This ultimately led to my project titled "adrift" because my search for the right place in life, the drifting, stops for a brief moment when I look at my photographs. In this project, I use my pursuit of this satisfaction as a source of creativity. In Chapter 1, "place," I examine how the city people seek their place in urban structures, in Chapter 2, "mind," how they are beeing adrift in their thoughts, and Chapter 3, "black," the latest part of the project, depicts how the inhabitants of the metropolises immerse themselves in the black of the city. Since the beginning of 2019, I have been running a gallery for street and landscape photography in the heart of Hamburg, in which I publish and sell my work and that of other selected photographers.