Siegfried Hansen
Siegfried Hansen, born in 1961, is a photographer, author and coach and is one of the most renowned German street photographers. Since 2022 he is Leica Masterclass Referent from the German Leica Akademie. His work has been presented worldwide in solo and group exhibitions. He is co-founder of the "German Street Photography Festival" and the website "German Street Photography". Hansen's works are also represented in several photo books "Streetfotografie made in Germany" (2018) and in the worldwide published "Street Photography Now" (2011). His own books "Hold the Line" (2015 Kettler Verlag) and "The flow of the lines" (2020 Eyeshot publisher) have been published very successfully. His latest book together with Pia Parolin "Mit offenen Augen" (2021 dpunkt Verlag) is a factual and guide for streetphotography and explains in great detail the "PILOT" system developed by Hansen. In his workshops, Hansen conveys his outstanding specialist knowledge as well as his special type and technique of photography in a vivid and practice-oriented manner. In 2002 I saw an exhibition by Andre Kertesz by chance and it impressed me so much that I changed my profession and wanted to become a photographer. For my photographic development it was and has always been good to be inspired by other photographers. Henri Cartier Bresson, Ernst Haas, Ray K.Metzker and Saul Leiter are photographers whose works I still enjoy looking at. Even painters such as Piet Mondrian, Lyonel Feininger and Edward Hopper have also influenced my artistic development. When I am on my photo tour in my hometown Hamburg (of course this also applies in other cities), I scan the events around me and try to focus on a very specific section that arouses my interest. I have a good sense of how lines converge, how graphic surfaces stand together and how an image has to be structured in order to be interesting. Beyond the formal, I can also recognize the bizarre in everyday things – in doing so, I look for the compositionally demanding motif. The human being plays only a subordinate role and must adapt to the overall graphic composition. For me, the camera is the tool through which I express my creativity, like the brush for the painter. In the beginning, more than 20 years ago, I had used a camera with zoom 80-200mm, now I work with a Leica Q2 with a fixed focal length of 28mm. Homepage: https://siegfried-hansen.de Instagram: Siegfried_hansen
