Aesthetics above all
Image Premium, Graphic Art, August 2016; Text; Urs Bretscher Images; Pit Buehler
"I have made up my mind. I'm not a reporter, my photos are not images of reality, and I'm not looking for the documentary in the image. But am I an artist now? What is art actually?" Well, if art has anything to do with skill, then Pit Buehler from Zug is definitely someone who makes art.
On the surface, it is not art that he is after, and he wants nothing to do with the art scene. His pictures show that he uses all the technical features of the equipment available today with great virtuosity, as if he were working with a brush, palette and easel. If you had to categorize him - against his will - you would perhaps call him a studio portraitist. But you don't have to, Pit Buehler doesn't need a category. He is probably unique and also quite unrivaled.
As blurred as the profile of this photographer seems, the conversation with him is initially as probing and exploratory. His portfolio reveals an almost exclusive fixation on people as a motif. But where does he get the subjects, the drive, and who is his work aimed at? And how does he get people in front of the camera?
When I take photographs, I hardly ever have a specific assignment. I come across something that appeals to me, that interests me; and then at some point it might become a project. Inspiration through reality, so to speak. At the moment it's the circus. It all started with the 40th Monte Carlo Circus Festival in January 2016, with an anniversary program. That appealed to me, so I got in touch with the organizers - and in this case it was the Princely House of Monaco itself.
What Pit Buehler doesn't say unless you specifically ask him is that he has invested months in preparation, persuasion, organization, logistics, finding helpers and detailed planning before he pulls the trigger for the first time. logistics, finding helpers and detailed planning. He is a well-structured detail fanatic, a precision freak, a tireless worker who doesn't give up until he has the perfect picture in the can "My quality standards are high, very high. This is especially true for the lighting on my shoots. It's very time-consuming, of course, but I don't usually have a lot of time because the artists and performers themselves don't have much of it." His tireless search for perfection helped him in Moscow when he photographed the Bolshoi Ballet last year. First of all, there were endless organizational hurdles of all kinds to overcome; the journey, the team, the equipment, permits, offices and authorities, and finally the theater management and the ballet master. Bühler initially spent a lot of time on and backstage as the dancers rehearsed. The photos were taken during a performance in the sold-out Bolshoi Theater; he had set up his photo studio in the presidential box and the dancers visited him according to a precisely defined schedule. I only had a few minutes with the people for each picture, and we were constantly at it from 8 o'clock in the morning until 5 o'clock the next morning. Everyone was enthusiastic about working on this project and was of course particularly pleased to receive a print of their photograph as a gift. A pleasant side effect: the photos sold extremely well. Even a Bühler has a cost of living ...
At the Bolshoi Theater, he used a Phase One (medium format) for numerous pictures, and his Nikon for others. And if Moscow, then it was the right place - an example of "inspiration by reality". Two further projects (Drag Queen and Russian War Veterans) were created during his visits, which can be seen in Pit's portfolio on the homepage. He used his D4 (now a D5) with fixed focal lengths of 24, 35, 58, 85 and 105 mm, sometimes also with the 70 - 200 mm zoom.
All his pictures reveal the talent that lies within Pit. He makes people feel comfortable in front of his camera. He stages them, spectacularly, but the pictures do not expose the people to ridicule, even if they are often distorted into extreme comedy. Tense lighting, short focal lengths, absolutely perfect focus accents and strong contrasts, with bright colors and incredibly dark backgrounds, often determine the image composition.
Yet Pit Buehler is anything but a trained artist. In 2008, he gave up his career as an investment specialist in a financial company and turned his previous hobby, the Photography, the main thing in his life. Photos from a 2000-km trip down the Amazon earned him an invitation to spend a whole year as a member of the master student class at the Leipzig Academy of Art; an excellent further education.
The two projects "Circus" and "Anastasia Makeeva" in his portfolio impressively demonstrate how masterfully he now knows how to push his motifs into dramatic exaggerations with image composition and lighting design. Like many photographers, he shows an affinity for black and white photography in some of his works. Here, the placement of light sources and the use of flash are even more crucial, because no splashes of color help to save a failed illumination. Some of the images from "Rehearsal Classes at Bolshoi Ballet" may serve as examples of this.
Pit Bühler is often out and about with the Profoto B1 or the Profoto Acetub 600; in studio photography, however, fixed light sources (Broncolor Para 88 with Profoto Flash Adapter) are often more important, and he often combines lamps and flash. Finally, in the search for the perfect aesthetics, post-processing on the computer is also not missing, but limited to the necessary minimum and without gimmickry. Pit Bühler's art is the elegantly combined use of all elements of modern photographic technology. What seems easy is ingeniously conceived and consistently worked out. From someone for whom nothing seems impossible and who spares no effort.
