Matthias Weber

The harbor is my studio and my subject. I grew up watching container ships move through the Elbe, and I have spent the last decade photographing the parts of that world that are quietly vanishing: the small repair shops, the manual cranes, the workers whose jobs are being automated away. I shoot only on black and white film because I want the images to sit outside of any particular moment, closer to an archive than to news. Every roll I develop by hand in a small darkroom near the port itself. I am not interested in nostalgia for its own sake. What I want is a record, made with the same patience the harbor itself demands, of a working landscape before it becomes a waterfront apartment complex. The camera lets me stay long enough to actually see it.