Berlin - Die Weltstadt Im Licht

A beautifully printed and presented volume of recently rediscovered photographs of Weimar Berlin - the illuminated city by night. Taken between 1925 and 1932 by Martin Höhlig (1882 - 1948). Höhlig was a versatile Berlin based commercial photographer who built a career as an accomplished portrait photographer in the 1920s. An interest in architecture led him into architectural and urban photography and a key event in his development was the Berlin Im Licht week in October 1928 - a citywide festival of architectural illumination dominated by powerful commercial messages sponsored by AEG, Osram, Siemens, Bewag and Telefunken designed to tell the world how German industry was being transformed by electrical energy. Höhlig was engaged to record the event and published a series of albums that were issued as promotional items by all the sponsors which are the source of this selection of photos. The tonal balance and the framing of the images is perfect. In the Third Reich, Höhlig’s career went into decline - as an affiliate photographer to the Association for the History of Berlin his membership was terminated in 1937 when Jewish members were expelled. Whether by resignation or expulsion is not known. After the war Höhlig found it impossible to rebuild his practice and he took his own life in 1948.  His reputation as an outstanding recorder of interwar Berlin is now secure alongside others such as Sasha Stone, Marco von Bucovich, Willy Römer and Max Missmann. 

For the traumatised war veterans desperate for work and the war weary public enduring rampant inflation and economic instability, the dazzle and glitter of decadent hedonism in Weimar Berlin was at best a remote and undignified spectacle and at worst a crude insult to public propriety. It would inspire the sense of popular resentment that opened the doors to the Nazis. When this blaze of luminescence was finally extinguished in 1939, the Nazified nation was propelled into 6 years of brutal conflict and genocide.  Which adds another layer to the experience of viewing these photos. There’s the aesthetic pleasure from the inventive exuberance of the visual dynamics on show but there’s also the foreshadowing of the dark days ahead and the part that this version of Berlin played in the process.

ISBN: 9783 942115 865

Published by Bussert & Stadeler, 2019 

 

Der Pott, Industriekultur im Ruhrgebiet

A massive block of a book - 640 pages of colour photographs of heavy industry in the Ruhr, mostly relics of the past but a few from the present.  Deindustrialisation wiped out an enormous amount of industrial structures in the region. Some of the more viable plant was exported to China but much of what remained was repurposed as spectacular heritage visitor attractions. More than 70 sites have been combined into a 400 kilometre heritage trail that reaches from Duisburg in the east to Hamm in the west.  Co-ordinating the scheme depended on a level of regional organisation that seems to be impossible in Britain where such sites are numerous but rarely work together.  Another factor that is less common in Germany is the British tendency to eliminate all traces of defunct industrial activity at the earliest opportunity. In part this reflects the shortage of development land in Britain and a pattern of land ownership that is always looking to extract maximum value from land assets. The same forces are at work in Germany but they are subject to stronger regulation in terms of public interest.

There’s long been a sense in Britain that industrial relics are intrinsically unsightly and unworthy of preservation and often the best examples get swept away with the worst.  In the north-east of England an enormous amount of industrial heritage was lost after the deindustrialisation of the region in the 60s and 70s as the ship yards, coal mines and steel works disappeared - it was left to Beamish Museum to salvage what it could but a regionally planned scheme would have been much more comprehensive.  It sometimes felt as if a Ground Zero policy was unofficially sanctioned as if removing the visual evidence of past industry would smooth the transition to a post-industrial future of low-wage insecure employment by breaking the links with lost occupations and the cultural traditions that sustained them.  It’s a process that still goes on - the Mayor of Tees Valley recently posed with indecent pride in front of the closed steelworks at Redcar and proudly announced its total demolition, having rejected all proposals for preservation as a visitor attraction.  The need for regeneration land is held to be paramount despite the vast amount that already exists.

Back to the book - each section has a map or plan, some historic images and explanatory text in English (as well as German and French). Stylistically the photography is primarily intended to record but without the studied neutrality of tone and compositional uniformity found in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.  There’s a sense of frontality emphasised by rigorous perspective correction. An interesting comparison is with the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch who recorded several of these sites soon after construction in pristine condition before the stresses of intensive operation and the ravages of fire, water, steam and oxidisation brought them to their present state.  Photographs make clear the tension that exists between the architecture of industrial buildings (admin blocks, pit-head enclosures, turbine halls) and the anti-architecture of industrial structures (blast furnaces, smelters, coke ovens, gas tanks, overhead conveyors, cooling towers).  While the buildings are often sensitively proportioned and detailed to incorporate contemporary idioms (Jugendstil, Gründerzeit, Brick Gothic), the industrial plant, despite being meticulously planned in terms of operational requirements, often has an improvisational, bricolage-like appearance, as if random forms have been welded together, as much in hope as expectation.  Functionality is the only consideration whereas architects like to set their sights on higher things in the pursuit of artistic expression. 

So what’s the appeal of the industrial landscape - why is it endlessly fascinating for some while others respond with indifference or outright hostility? Mine is the last generation to be born and raised in a world where the industrial landscape was commonplace, especially so in the north-east where I lived.  Every journey to and from school would pass collieries, shipyards and factories - an unceasing spectacle where welding torches flashed in smoke filled gloom while overhead cranes and hoists propelled massive components in a display of perpetual motion. Pit-head winding gear could be seen spinning at speed, hauling cage-loads of coal to the surface where it was washed, graded and tipped into railway wagons around the clock.  All this industrial activity was so deeply embedded into the locality that to the eyes of a child it seemed it would continue unchanged, for ever.  This is the power of the industrial sublime - to induce nostalgia for jobs that were massively physically demanding and ruinous to health in an environment where water courses were lethally polluted, where the sea was stained charcoal grey from colliery waste and the air quality was laden with toxic fumes. Despite this, displaced industrial workers can often be heard waxing lyrical on the lost camaraderie of the workplace where unions enjoyed 100% support and stood together to resist management’s unreasonable demands. They often recall taking pride in the finished article as the embodiment of their skills and expertise. The continuing appeal of the industrial landscape has cultural, social and aesthetic elements of which the last may prove the most enduring - there’s nothing else in the man-made environment that’s left behind so many extraordinary physical structures enhanced by the patina of ageing and replete with formal repetition wrapped in complex networks of contrasting forms (tubes, cones, pipes, cylinders, grids, filters) on such a vast scale.

See also:

Gelsenkirchen 1914

Past and Present No. 10: Henrichenburg Schiffshebewerk

Ruhrgebiet in Close-up

Margaretenhöhe - refuge from dystopia

Essen Zollverein

 

Off the Shelf: The Crime of Cuba

In the course of 50 years, Carleton Beals (1893–1979), wrote and published more than 50 books, many of them on Latin-American subjects. He never wavered in his support for left wing causes and in his latter years wrote in defence of Castro’s Cuban Revolution. Beals produced this book, The Crime of Cuba, in less than 3 months after a visit to Cuba in late 1932. It reads as an angry denunciation of American interference in the island’s politics and economy. Following an account of Cuba’s troubled history under Spanish rule and the virtual eradication of the indigenous population, Beals describes how the US government reserved the right to intervene militarily in the defence of “political order and private property” via the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901 in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. When Beals visited in 1932, the island was gripped by political unrest and violence as resistance mounted to the tyrannical rule of dictator, Gerardo Machado. The book presents a charge-sheet of Machado’s abuses of power, flagrant disregard for human rights and brutal campaign of intimidation and assassination directed against his political opponents in the press, the student movement and the trade unions.

Beals’s book was to be published by Lippincott in summer 1933. A senior editor at the publisher, Ernestine Evans, recommended Walker Evans to provide some photographic content. Despite being short of both work and cash, Evans presented a surly and truculent face to Beals on the occasion of their one and only meeting, insisting that his photos should be bound in at the end of the text in a sequence to be determined by him. Evans spent 3 weeks in Havana, taking photographs and hanging out with Ernest Hemingway, who co-opted Evans as his nightly drinking partner. More than 400 photos were taken, from which Evans selected 64 for submission to the publisher. He indicated a group of 31 for publication. Although Evans as a Manhattan bohemian was often in the company of Marxists and Communist party members, he was no radical. Fastidious to a point, he would always hold himself apart from progressive politics, which made him a curious choice for this assignment. On the streets of Havana, Evans could not escape the evidence of the brutality of the Machado regime, but he refrained from making it the central point of his photography. What he ended up with was something he was much more comfortable with – a rich portrait of the vitality of the city’s street life. Poverty and deprivation were part of that portrait, and presented with the studied neutrality that Evans brought to all his work. For the most part, Evans was drawn to subjects that had preoccupied him back in New York – detailed scrutiny of the built environment, outdoor advertising, hand painted signage, street traders and sidewalk compositions with figures. Portrait subjects were mostly dock workers, sex workers and street people. A minority of photos were taken in the suburbs and surrounding small towns and illustrated the ubiquitous dilapidation and decay, once the faded grandeur of the Baroque city centre was left behind.

By the time The Crime of Cuba was published on August 17th. 1933, Machado’s grip on power was ended – he fled into exile on August 12th. His excesses were no longer acceptable to the US government who brokered his removal from offices. Ever the optimist, the artist Ben Shahn (longtime friend of Evans) predicted a victory for the proletariat in post-Machado Cuba. It was Evans who would be proved correct when he predicted an increase in comfort for the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and nothing for the proletariat. As for the book – it contained 31 of Evans’s photos plus 3 that he selected from local newspaper archives in Havana and by their content and location at the back of the book, they formed a tonal counterpoint to Beals’s polemic, while providing a context for the political and social drama that Beals was describing. For Evans, the experience would serve as a rehearsal for his contribution to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, where his photographs would again occupy their own exclusive space, only this time they would appear at the front of the book. 

Long Story Short: Long-winded, left-wing propagandist engages services of fancy photographer to bring some visual interest to dreary diatribe of anti-Americanism.

Praha všedního dne – Everyday Prague 1959

This is a selection of Prague photographs from the 1950s, published in 1959 with the title Praha všedního dne (Everyday Prague). Erich Einhorn (1928-2006) was the photographer and on this evidence, a highly accomplished and unusually observant practitioner. The images show a high level awareness of European, American and Soviet photo-traditions, plus an instinct for prowling the streets and seizing the moment. From 1955, Einhorn was employed as a photo-journalist on the newly founded newspaper, Večerní Praha which suggests the photos in this book were taken as part of, or alongside, his day-job. Elevated viewpoints alternate with street level shots. There’s an acute sensitivity to the potential of shadows as compositional elements and some straightforward Pictorialism, relieved by an eye for the incongruous. The layout of the book is carefully considered with pairings chosen for their complementary characteristics. Double page spreads are used sparingly but effectively. Einhorn’s other photobooks include travelogues (Prague Castle, Spas of West Bohemia) as well as additional urban studies of Prague and Moscow.