Interview Paul M. Newcastle, U.D., Germany

Paul, thanks for taking the time for this interview. May you please introduce yourself?

Paul M. Newcastle is the anglicized form of my name, which is Paul Martin Nauhaus. I have been using this form since my youth for all kinds of artistic activities. The "U. D." was added later and means "Universal dilettante" with the meaning of "dilettante", that this is one who pursues an occupation out of hobbyism. I first lived in various places in Central Germany and, after my escape from the GDR, in the Rhine-Main area, mainly in Frankfurt. I have been based in Gotha for ten years. After one semester, I dropped out of my architectural studies and got a job. I shorten the later, many stations: work as a waiter, training as a chef in a Frankfurt Michelin-starred restaurant, gastronomy career in the Rhine-Main area, change to an office job as a financial accountant and personnel administrator, finally with fifty training as a certified geriatric nurse. At the same time, I had a publishing house and worked artistically in graphics and photography.

We are excited about your abstract photographs you presented at several exhibitions – What is your inspiration, what are your favorite subjects?

I don't have any favorite motifs. I photograph what interests me, and that's diverse. Not my favorite motifs are, for example, still lifes of flowers or heaped shots of landscapes. In order to find a motif, I rarely proceed according to a plan, but decide according to my intuition. If I proceed (more or less) according to plan, then most likely with portrait photography or if I do a titled project. I also count competition entries among these projects. Architecture happens frequently, because it is easily available everywhere and almost free of data protection restrictions. I have also produced some "street photography", and I would also like to portray more people, but I lack models. During the time of the Lockdown I made a virtue out of necessity and fabricated several series of self-portraits. I show one of them here [Figure 5]. I work „straighter“ and more traditional. I decided to keep my style, not to participate in every fashion. As an example, I mention my series from the Völklingen Ironworks [Figure 3], which is apparently documentary, but certainly shows eroticism in a technical motif. None of this is possible without me having an attitude. I don't want to exhibit white photo paper that I have stared at for hours and declared a work of art through this process. I show my concrete environment through the lens, sometimes alienated by the technique of recording, of film; of development, of withdrawal in the darkroom. [Figure 4]

Please tell us more about the photo contest “Bauhaus 2019” at the Kunstforum Gotha, where two of your photographs has been exhibited

In 2018, there was a call for applications for the photo competition "Discovering Bauhaus – Searching for Traces in the Free State of Thuringia". The Bauhaus and the New Building have interested me for a long time. In my native city of Erfurt, but also in other Thuringian cities, I know many buildings in this tradition, and of course I am not the only one. For this reason, I decided not to photograph the well-known buildings (or objects), but rather unknown, hidden ones. I concentrated on Erfurt's Hanseatic quarter around Hamburger, Altonaer and Flensburger Straße. I was happy when two of my pictures were selected. Here I show a picture from the series that was not shown in the exhibition. [Figure 6] This exhibition had a completely unexpected late consequence for me: possibly I will be allowed to participate in a feature film. I can't tell you more about that yet.

 Can you remember the very first picture you captured? What was the theme of the photograph?

I can't remember the very first picture. But I can use my negatives to pretty much pinpoint when I started photographing and with which camera: I was ten or eleven years old, and my camera was an Altissa inherited from my grandparents, a simple camera that hardly anyone should know today. Here I show my (only) picture [1] of the Göltzschtalbrücke in Saxony (the largest brick bridge in the world), taken on ORWO NP20 (ISO 80). This picture already shows a little bit of a direction in which I later developed.

 What cameras do you use preferably, do you develop your films by yourself?

At the moment my favorite camera is the Hasselblad 500 C/M with the 80-millimeter normal lens (fixed focal length). I own several other cameras, but most of them are only used by my Minolta 7000 AF for small picture films, with three lenses. For special tasks in medium format, I occasionally use a Moskva-2 (replica of the Zeiss Ikonta) and an Agfa box (both in 6x9 cm format).

I have been developing my own films for twenty years. I keep a very precise record of how I developed which film and also how I enlarged every single print. My favorite films are the HP4 Plus and the HP5 from Ilford, the TriX 400 from Kodak, the DoubleX from Cinestill and most recently the Delight Art 100 from KONO. I try to take into account the chosen exposure and the motifs already during development. For me, the manual processes are the attraction of analogue work. In addition, there is the limitation of the number of recordings. It makes a huge difference whether I am "forced" to imagine each image individually and plan it precisely so that I do not waste a frame, or whether instead of twelve or thirty-six shots per film, I have the option to store about 1,200 digital images on an SD card.

Where can we learn more about you and your work, are there more exhibition planned?

You can get an overview of my way of photographing on my page image.nauhaus.de and on Instagram. No specific exhibitions are currently planned. Every one to three months, I plan and photograph themed projects. From some of these projects I have made books in small editions. My most recent project was called "Tainted Love" and can be seen on Instagram. Somewhat atypical for me, I tried a new color film for this project: the very surprising KONO! Delight ART 100 in medium format. I have to say that I am enthusiastic about this product. Nevertheless, I will continue to prefer to work in black and white in the future. It is the kind of graphics and tonal values that comes closest to my thinking and feeling. Through these projects, I create a larger archive of topics from which I can draw when a competition or an exhibition is due again.