Dominik Wagner: Eating at Brooklyn diner. Photo By: David Toro
Dominik Wagner sent us a link via Facebook, showcasing his thesis project entitled: Wasteland. A series of shots captured to bring the lifestyle of skating through Dominik’s eyes. These photos came to be during Dom’s stay in NYC a few months back. Aside from being a very talented skater, he’s also doubles as a very gifted photographer.
From skating road rash, rolling “cleanliness”, and eclectic personalities, these photos capture it all. These photos of skating and everyday routines, really come to light through D-wags photography by setting the tone and bringing forth composition and texture to give you a sense of the daily culture and characters that are part of our scene. Dominik was awesome enough to talk about his latest project with us. This book marks Dom’s graduation from Lette-Verein Berlin where he is now certified as a photodesigner. He will actually be coming back to NYC on a six month photography internship this summer.
Wasteland is currently in the process of being published: more info coming soon.
Click below to see what Dom had to say in regards to his latest project as well as some photos of a recent gallery that Dom had the pleasure of having his work displayed in.
Dominik Wagner: www.wagner-photography.de
Wasteland
Forever Now
Dominik Writes:
My intention behind this project is to display the lifestyle of rollerblading beyond just being an extreme sport.
The way I shot this project Wasteland is the result of my former project, Forever Now which was the first time I tried to capture skating lifestyle the way I see it. Forever Now was shot in Barcelona, Texas, and New Hampshire. After finishing that project I didn’t want to stop and chose to move forward with a series of portraits, cityscapes, and skating shots from New York City!
The name Wasteland came up in my mind one day during my trip, I was sitting in the car and it was moving super fast, everything was passing by like a movie. Damaged cars, broken houses, and graffiti everywhere. I started to feel like this is such a wasteland! No disrespect to where I was staying, the great thing about the title it self is that it’s very open to interpretation. At the time being, that’s just the feeling that the title evoked. NYC has so many great places to skate.
For the people that don’t know, both Forever Now and Wasteland are names of old school skate videos. Referencing a skate video happened to be just mere coincidence but I figured after doing that with my first project, why not follow up and do the same with the next since it relates directly to what the content is all about. This is how the name Wasteland came to be.
Both projects were shot with my Mamiya 645 with a 80mm 1.9 lens and two Olympus mju (stylus) point and shoot cameras. I broke one camera in barcelona! My cameras being analog, it’s very important for me to have equipment of great quality but also having a fast lens to match that. Specially when shooting skating.
Developing these two books was a bit tedious in the beginning. The first project took me forever. I had a really bad workflow and ended up working 4 month straight on the book after shooting was finished! Wasteland on the other hand was great I had 80% of my film material developed in New York cause it was so much cheaper there, and I think I learned a lot about workflow during the time working on forever now, so the book was done not even one and half month after finishing shooting!
