#5.7 – A Peculiar Roll (1993)

Berlin-Schöneberg, II/2016, OM2n, Zuiko 50/1.4, Fujicolor HG100 (exp. II/1993), restored

The year 1993 was an interesting one for me: First jobs as a journalist, covering Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic, Sonic Youth’s splendid Show with their album “Dirty”, some art shows. I was 26 and had been moving from West to East Berlin, right into the center of a bohemian disctric and wasn’t photographing since seven or eight years already. But I was interested in photography and purchased Madonna’s coffee table book “Sex”, for example and was a regular reader of “The Face” and “Dazed & Confused”.

Berlin-Schöneberg, II/2016, OM2n, Zuiko 50/1.4, Fujicolor HG100 (exp. II/1993), restored

The Smashing Pumpkins were in Berlin with Nirvana as support. PJ Harvey released her second album (“Rid of Me”). Bill Clinton succeeded George. W. Bush as the President of the United States of America (my wife lived in New York City then) and the next photograph with an own camera (a little Canon digital point and shoot) was taken by me around ten years later.

It was in February 1993 that this Fujicolor Super HG 100 (CN 135) with 24 frames expired. I suppose that Mr. Müller, who donated the OM2n last week (“The Exhibition Cam”), bought this roll in Italy 1992 – on a vacation, I guess.

Some minutes after Mr. Müller handed me over his beloved Olympus in the bag where it was stored for more than twenty years, I found that peculiar roll there and loaded the camera, which is a nice and compact camera when you are used to hold a Nikon F4 or even a F5 in your hands. I dialed the ISO ring down to 80 and got started.

When I got the prints back a fews days ago, they looked like they had been drenched in blood or some sort of red wine – all brown and red. All the greens and blues had been disappeared. So I tried to restore some of the pictures and show some of them side by side.