arrival

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

© Lilly Schwartz 2013

All pictures taken with: Olympus Pen E-PL3 and Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 ASPH.

Although posting pictures in a delayed fashion is on some level good, because it allows me to distance myself emotionally from the shots, it also might be slightly confusing to you readers. After all my narrative happens mostly in the present while the accompanying pictures come from the past. Although travel pictures are somewhat appropriate for yesterday, Berlin was actually not my destination. Right now I am actually in Chemnitz and we arrived yesterday by car. If you ever spent an extended amount of time on the motorway you can probably imagine how very bored I was in the car on the passenger seat. There is only so much time you can spend eating and after a few initial shots around the Berlin city motorway the landscape quickly turned too boring to be enjoyable photographically. At least the journey from Berlin to Chemnitz is not long, so I only had to kill a few hours. Still, after arriving I realised that boredom and visual monotony leads to extreme tiredness. At least when you’re driving yourself you need to pay attention, but as a passenger it turned out to be just mind-numbing grey-brown emptiness.

Whenever I arrive in Chemnitz I start to feel slightly off. It is the slightly restless trapped feeling that seemed to pervade my teenage years. Usually this is accompanied by the world lining up with my emotions by showing me something to underline this feeling of hopelessness and boredom. In the past I would step off the train and see a skinhead or already hear a completely idiotic conversation in our dialect on the train. Surprisingly even after a car journey the world managed to provide me with a similarly disturbing experience: The first person I saw arriving in Chemnitz was a guy in full camouflage gear hitting his shepherd dog with the leash. Well, thank you, dear universe, for reminding me why I do not live in this city anymore. Of course this is nothing more than selective perception – I chose to see this person instead of ignoring it – but still it illustrates how very strange it is for me to visit my hometown.

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