The everyday idiosyncrasies of Berlin’s streets
- Text by Niall Flynn
- Photography by Hanko Ye
Hanko Ye likes seeing the unseen. It’s these kind of moments – the minor, everyday, inconsequential – that the Berlin-based photographer finds most interesting. Armed with his camera, you’ll find him navigating the streets of the German capital, shooting scenes and interactions that most of us would deem trivial. Whether it’s a glancing smile on the city’s U-Bahn, or the way the light falls on a group of kids in the supermarket, if Hanko Ye likes how it looks, he’ll make a picture out of it.
“I just follow my curiosity and try not to think too close-minded,” he tells Huck. “Just paying really close attention to every detail happening around me, but at the same time not to stress or force [anything]. I need the freedom of doing nothing and photographing without a specific reason. I don’t have any preferences when it comes to approaching strangers or characters on the street – I let intuition press the shutter.”
The result of such intuition is Things I Want To Be Good At, an online canvas consisting of images taken on Berlin’s streets. Originally intended as a platform for him to showcase all manner of work (when he first made the website, he was interested in pursuing so many different careers – acting, architecture, engineering, illustration, the police – that he needed a place in which to narrow everything down, hence the name), photography very quickly gained precedence. It makes for a dreamy sequence of collated non-moments, made beautiful through Ye’s all-seeing lens, that feels completely to unique to the city.
“They have no structure, no order,” he says. “They are just moments I caught on the street while walking around doing nothing but enjoying myself, observing other people. Even though the pictures might not seem personal, I have a super personal relationship with them.”
“[With street photography] you don’t need anything. You don’t need a model, or studio, or nice weather in order to shoot the best landscapes – you don’t even need a camera. Just having a smartphone will do the job. You can start right off.”
See pictures from Things I Want To Be Good At as part of NIGHT & DAY at FK Kollektiv on October 7.
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