172 pages Text(s) by Peter Stelzig 30 x 20 cm Language: English, German Hardcover Publisher: Peter Stelzig Edition of 500 copies 2016
An unusual hybrid: at once a photo book on Berlin train writing and a working manual on how to photograph it. Peter Stelzig has documented the Berlin scene since 1998, turning his lens primarily to painted trains from 2001, and this volume gathers fourteen years of that work — U-Bahn and S-Bahn cars caught across more than three hundred images. What sets it apart from the standard trainwriting book is its second life as a technical guide: each chapter is built around a specific way of seeing, from compact and SLR film to digital, with detailed passages on double exposure, lomography, cross-processed slide film, black-and-white, infrared and special-effect stocks.
The result is a considered argument for photography as the essential medium of the graffiti scene — a case against the auto-mode reflex, aimed squarely at writers and spotters who want to think harder about how the work is recorded. Self-published in a limited edition of 500 and running to 172 hardcover pages, it is both a personal retrospective of a Berlin documentarian and a genuinely useful piece of craft literature, increasingly hard to find as the small print run sells through — especially in signed copies.
