Fotograf Magazine

To make a long story short, Temporary Discomfort started as a work on the global economic summits, at a time when Jules Spinatsch had lost his belief in classical photojournalism. It was inspired largely by Sophie Riestelhuber’s work Fait and her claim that photographers should rather work in places they know and have control of, instead of going to exotic destinations to cover conflicts they don’t understand. Hence, Jules started at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where he had grown up, and then followed the summit to Genoa, New York and Evian/Geneva. In this sense, TD is a quest about the conditions under which photography can be produced to cover such events, which are normally sealed off from both the general public (as we are all potential protesters) and the press (as some of the meetings will have never taken place, officially). He starts off by using a range of different tools, from the classic photojournalistic 35 mm to long telescopic lenses, medium format cameras, and video.