Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek
Heidi: Tell us about the first image that sparked this series?
Daniel: The first cat was Elli – the one from my parents at their home in Tirol, Austria. She was also the one who got me in touch with the following cats: Ume, Elli, Flitzie, Nevio and Fiffy.
Are you provoking the cats to jump?
I did not touch any of the cats. It all happens with trust. After many seatings we got very intimate and they started to relax and let lose. Finally they behaves like they always do when nobody is watching. They where just dancing and jumping around for fun. At this point it was super easy for me to take their picture. Im really happy and thankful to be able to share these moments with you.
Are the cats in the project all your own cats? if not, did you have to cast them?
All mutual friends
At what speed are you shooting?
1/125 of a second
What happened once you posted this project online?
It went quite viral, and now I sell prints and a calendar
How did the alpaca story for the Office come about?
I was driving through the countryside of Austria after a stressful job. Suddenly I saw a field full of Alpacas and stopped my car to catch a glimpse. This was such an intense experience and immediately made me feel relieved. I decided to try to capture that feeling and worked on a project shooting them to send all their positive energy to those who get as much joy as I did from them. I came up with the idea to publish them as a calendar since thats a medium you can look at everyday in your kitchen and hopefully feel a bit better. Office was just the perfect match to publish that calendar with since they understand my ideas and share my love for alpacas.
It’s rare you find an archive welcoming downloading for comping and layout, can you tell me why you included this?
A few years ago everybody was super afraid that their content got stolen in the bad internet. So people started to build up websites that try to make it impossible to download their work; I think that makes no sense. The internet is a endless source of inspiration and it’s made to share and use work of others. So I decided to even go one step further and help people to steal my work and make it easy for editors and creative directors to include my pictures in their mood boards for upcoming projects. I believe in karma and think they will get back to me after they land a job with using my pictures for their pitch.
How was this shoot for Monocle a defining moment for you?
This was a quite special assignment since they had to fight for a very long time to get access to that warship in Dubai. I’m very honored they choose me to cover that story, we decided to also shoot film. I was using two different medium format film cameras (Contax 645 + Mamiya 7) and on the second day I noticed a bit strange sound from my shutter. After I shot a full roll I checked my camera only to find out the shutter was completely broken almost giving me a got a heart attack! I was lucky to have a second backup camera with me (Mamiya 7) After this experience I decided to never ever again work with film on a assignment.
How difficult was it to shoot the Koi farm for Masses?
When I was working in Tokyo for a few assignments for Baron, The Travel Almanac and Monocle, Masses hit me up and asked me to find a Koi farm to shoot for them. This was not as easy as you might think. Shooting on location in Japan was very bureaucratic and not very open for photography. Luckily I had a great producer and she was able to convince a Koi farm to let photograph their farm. I was only allowed to shoot a specific range of Kois. I was not allowed to photograph those fish which were sold since they could not ask all their owners for their permission. I loved how respectful they were to the owners.