Friedrich Lommel

Friedrich Lommel carried a bakelite box of glass plates in his coat pockets wherever he walked, snapping street corners at dusk when the neon signs flickered on. He didn’t call them photographs, he called them “light drawings,” because the long exposures turned moving cars into streaks across the frame. You’ll find this trick first in his 1930s Berlin negatives; hunt the ones shot at Potsdamer Platz and watch the past reappear like ink spilled across stone.