City tales

Between Photography and Film
By Martin Schaub, Tages Anzeiger, 19 March 1994
Lüdin is not only an author of films, his photographic projects also deal with the time factor in an idiosyncratic way. More than ten years ago, for example, he took portraits of people in Sicily with a Polaroid camera, observed them with a 35 mm camera as they looked at the picture that was gradually taking shape, and visited his models a week later to see and photograph the place the Pola had taken up in their households in the meantime. (...) 'City tales' go back to a first attempt in 1979. They are phase pictures, groups of three in the same format, displayed on a horizon, with small spaces between the individual moments. In these interstices, the invisible happens; the result can be seen in the following picture. If you take the time, and a little time is needed, because no sensational events appear, on the contrary. Very small everyday stories are told. Most of the time, the stories are shot from the same camera point of view.
Lüdin could also set up a film camera there and shoot a fixed shot. Then he could choose the significant individual images. But Lüdin's film runs in his head and in his senses; he finds the significant moments right away.
For example, he discovers a scene of condolences with his camera in the evening light at a tram stop in front of a hospital; he notices a symmetrical story between a grandfather and his grandson, a scene with some random props; he tells the rather bizarre story of two motorcyclists and their companions. Only once does Lüdin reverse the process of storytelling by circling a merely sitting, city-famous Basel original with the camera and revealing him to the viewer: a man sitting in legionnaire uniform in front of a café, his face disfigured by burns. A revelation, a little shock.

Lüdin's photographic work 'City tales' shows the same profundity that is characteristic of his documentary film work.