This series potrays a personal expression of my daily experience in contemporary Sydney life. “The Holga Diaries” is a gritty behind the scenes look at the back streets and forgotten corners of the iconic city of Sydney. The series depicts a raw social documentary from a subjective perspective with a fine art feel. The images are shot with a plastic toy camera called a Holga. My Holga camera is my constant companion, he lives in my handbag, I take him to the beach, he comes out drinking, he gets dropped, he gets wet, he sometimes pops open and splits in two. He is prone to light leaks, vignetting, blur and perspective distortion and it is these elements of chance and mishap that attract me to him. In the age of 40 mega pixel cameras, the ever increasing Holga craze is bringing attention back to the basic elements of photogrophy; light recorded on film through a hole in a box.”
The images were shot on traditional black and white film with later additions of layers of warm colours and intricate textures in Photoshop to create a soft and misty focus. I thereby combine elements of analogue photography with digital imaging to create artworks that delve beyond the medium of photography and add elements of drawing and collage. The result is a series of images that have an almost dream like haziness and a timeless sentimentality.
"It takes a real eye and an incredible depth of perspective on reality to take what most view as the banal and everyday things in life and present them in a manner and tone that stirs real emotion and contemplation in the viewer. Fischer's work achieves this feat while at the same time being compositionally superb."