KÖLN 11:11
11 travellers. 2 guides. 1 living room. 21,823 photographs.
KÖLN 11:11 was the first trip of roadtrip, etc. six days in february 2025, based in cologne, built around carnival, leica and my own living room. the promise was an ode to tradition, to the history of photography and to german design, as you have not read it in any book. i had been writing this trip in my travel notebooks since 2018. it took seven years and eleven photographers to get it out of the paper.
We moved every piece of furniture in the house to make room for them. Breakfast in the kitchen, photo reviews on the sofas, surrounded by all the books so we could pull them off the shelves whenever an argument needed settling. No Zoom, no hotel meeting room with a projector on a stand and burnt coffee in a thermos.
In Germany, shoes stay at the door. So the only real dress code of the week was nice socks, in good condition.
we shared as a group, but we photographed from the personal. you don't come here to take group photos. you come here to be in a group and then go make your own pictures.
we were picked up in düsseldorf, drove straight into köln without dropping the bags, went up to wetzlar to sleep inside the world of leica, came back down through melatenfriedhof, crossed the city through its underground stations, gave ourselves to rosenmontag, and closed in the belgisches viertel.
Camera in hand from minute one — charged battery, empty card, suitcases left at the hotel, straight out to meet Köln. The weather gave us everything it had: one single day brought rain, hail, snow and sun, in that order, with the manners of a host who can't decide what to serve.
Leica Camera Iberia lent a camera to every traveller for the whole week and then hosted us in Wetzlar — the Ernst Leitz Museum, the factory, the archive, and a night sleeping inside the world of Leica, so that das Wesentliche, the essential, stopped being a slogan on a wall and became something eleven people could hold in their hands.
Two days later we were at the Atelier für historische Fotografie with Matthias Weikamm, making wet plate collodion. We had come from a factory that builds some of the most precise cameras in the world, and walked into a room where the image only appears if the chemistry, the temperature and your hands agree with each other. Doing both in the same week is the fastest way we know to understand what photography actually is.
Matthias portrayed us. Without mercy, and somehow in the future.
Red and white, the colours of the city's flag, are the colours of carnival. 11:11 is the hour cologne agrees to stop being a serious german city.
Rosenmontag is not a parade you watch. It's a parade that happens to you.
What the eleven of them brought back involves a black eye, a memory card missing in action, two closed motorway toilets, one neighbour we drove completely insane, a pair of trousers of great documentary value and difficult future use, a Turkish restaurant that does not sell alcohol — no, really, it does not — and a WhatsApp group whose entire archive reads: going down, lobby, going down, lobby. Fifty per cent of the knees present were, by the end, openly asking for help.
None of that is in the itinerary. All of it is in the pictures.
THE REVIEWS
Two hours of tutored review, every single day, and this is the part that defines roadtrip, etc. more than any destination on the calendar.
Editing — reviewing, selecting and sequencing, not retouching — is what takes you deep into what defines a photographer and separates them from every other one. Looking for the relationships between someone's pictures that they themselves cannot see, because from the inside it is almost impossible.
So that is what the nights were for. Not judging whether a photograph is good or bad, but handing out clues on how to keep working, so each of them would understand a little better what their own photography is made of. Eleven people photographing the same city, the same parade, the same grey afternoon, and eleven completely different weeks coming back on the screen. We all see differently, even when we are standing in front of the exact same thing.
1 + 1 = 21,823.
Weeks after everyone had flown home, we sat down with each of them again, one by one, half an hour on Zoom, to go through the whole of their work and edit it together. Because a trip like this does not end when the plane leaves.
Thank you to Roberto Mata for saying yes to the very first one, when it was still only a document and a lot of faith — defying mathematics, 1 + 1 has never equalled 2 here. To Isabel, for holding the entire logistical universe together so the rest of us could look through viewfinders. To the team at Leica Camera Iberia, to Matthias Weikamm, to the Hopper Hotel St. Josef in the Südstadt and to the Vienna House by Wyndham Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar.
And to ours eleven travellers for being the first. Somebody has to be, and it was you.
