let’s buy a gun © Lilly Schwartz 2012

On Sunday the place to be in Berlin is apparently the flea market in the Mauerpark. My friend Damien was still in town, so we decided to go there to hunt for old soviet rangefinder cameras. Damien is not only into robots, geeky solar powered gardening and sticking electrodes into nerve cells, but also into analog black and white photography. I also want to start shooting film with range finder cameras, so I was glad to be able to pick his brains, since he owns several of these old range finder models. I got a real kick out of playing with his Kiev 4 in a café on Friday as well.

Turns out that all the cameras they had were collapsable or polaroid ones, which were all in pretty bad shape. However, instead of finding a nice soviet camera I only managed to buy a record I wanted to have since I was 12 or something. The record, Die Ärzte’s Debil is on the German “Index”, i.e. cannot be sold to kids under 18, which is why I didn’t buy it at the time. I only had half of it on tape back then. It’s German teen punk from the 80’s with a tendency to rather wrong lyrics (on Debil there is one about a girl and her shepherds dog … and yes, that’s the song that got the record on the Index …). I used to be a big fan, although nowadays I really only like their stuff from the 80’s. I think I stopped listening to them after they made a record about … hair. It was called “Le Frisur” and was just beyond stupid. Thanks to the record our trip to the flea market wasn’t a disappointment. Apparently the flea market on Boxhagener Platz is better on the rangefinder front, but we only figured that out later.

And if this all wasn’t strange enough, this seemingly harmless guy … bought a gun. He hovered a while, looked at it thoroughly and gave me plenty of time to take some shots of him. It’s a gas pistol, but I still found it pretty odd.