Seilbahn Assmannshausen — Photo production
Landscape and tourism photography at the Assmannshausen cable car in the Rheingau. Open two-seaters float over the rows of vines, the slate roofs of the…
The chairlift at Assmannshausen in the Rheingau, photographed in service. Open two-seaters float over the rows of vines, the slate roofs of the village and the Rhine with its sandbank below; in one chair a dog sits beside its owner, in another two passengers hold a phone up. A lift is photographically a vessel for the view — the chair is only interesting as long as it leaves the valley behind it visible.
This was photographed on a bright summer day, which is not good news. The sun is high, the valley glares, and the riders sit backlit above a landscape that is luminous in itself. Expose for the vineyards and the chairs become silhouettes; expose for the faces and the Rhine is gone. So the frames are made in between and kept dark — shadow in a chair can be brought back, blown-out water cannot.
Where you stand along the line decides everything else. A chairlift runs past pylons of green lattice steel, and one of those behind a rider destroys the very view that is the subject. So the position is chosen so that the slate roofs, the church tower and the sandbank in the river sit behind the seat — and then a long lens brings village and river up close behind the chair instead of letting them drift into the distance.
There is no time. An oncoming chair passes once, at a known height and a known speed, and nobody poses. Focus is therefore set in advance, and what is left is one moment per rider: two women in summer dresses drifting in laughing, someone holding a phone out at arm's length, a couple riding backwards down into the village. That offhandedness is the whole reason to photograph a lift at all — not the machinery, but the quarter of an hour it sells.
- Rheingau
- Assmannshausen
