The Part After the Shoot

Photographer Alwin Maigler was in the middle of a large studio series—thirteen people, carefully lit, the kind of work you plan for weeks—when the session with Ekka ended and something better happened. The lights stayed on, the music went up, the flash moved to the camera, and whatever they’d been so careful about was set aside for something looser and faster. With ’trash’ it’s always about feeling and spontaneity, Alwin told me. You can’t plan it or steer it. It doesn’t work with everyone.

With Ekka it worked. She’s nineteen, grew up in Stuttgart, and has the kind of ease in front of a lens that you either have or you don’t. The formal part of the session had taken the whole afternoon, and by the time the trash portion began they were already warm, already comfortable—the kind of rapport that makes a photograph feel like a memory rather than a record. The results ended up in Apple Pie Magazine, though Alwin is the first to point out that those images were technically the side effect, not the main event.

There’s something appealing about the idea that the best work happens after the work is officially done—when nobody’s trying anymore, when the music is on and the brief has been forgotten. Stuttgart has a reputation for producing people worth photographing. I have no theory about why. I just notice it keeps being true.