Kvest (republished pictures from 2015)

I’m not entirely satisfied with the photos from this event, firstly because I didn’t manage to catch everything I wanted to, and secondly because what I did take could have been better.

I missed a lot of it because there were several chaperones, and each of them was off on their own mission, and I just couldn’t be everywhere. I grabbed onto each group as they came my way and tried to capture at least part of their story for each of them, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get any light for the bogatyrs… I did try to capture some of their heroism, but even the light of the halogen lamp by the arena wasn’t enough.

And as for the photographs. Although I hadn’t originally planned it that way, the pictures of the fourth iteration of the Kvest became part of a technical experiment. I limited myself to one lens, this time the shorter 24-80, and left the telephoto lens I had used to photograph all of Azeroth two weeks earlier in my backpack. It wasn’t a long-term plan; it came to mind when I arrived and started thinking about how to shoot the Kvest. I’ve estimated that not many people had a telephoto lens in the 90s.

It definitely showed in the photos from the Kvest, and although I’m not entirely happy with the result, it added to the 90s-ness of the images.

The whole game heavily builds on the nostalgia of late-millennium co-op games, with their extreme naivety in storylines, where no one asks questions but instead rushes to solve any hint of a story that comes their way. On the other hand, it wasn’t the nineties in full force. In the past, we used strings to symbolise walls; now, on the Kvest, we have real buildings and historical tents. Same with the costumes, people didn’t ditch their current costumes for white T-shirts, jeans, and a bed sheet for a cloak.

At least that’s how it felt to me, but I’m not a larp theorist to make my opinion any more informed. For me, it was mostly nostalgia and fighting for memories from my first larp games, where I started to figure out what larp was, and that it wasn’t just about hitting two pieces of wood against each other.

A lot has changed in the sixteen years I’ve been around the battle/larp scene. I’ve seen many game worlds and players disappear, but there are many more new ones. It’s nice to know that this subculture isn’t fading into obscurity, but rather fighting for its place in the sun. For fifteen years, I have not been documenting a dying ethnicity, but rather its growth.