In a week’s time, over six hundred picture professionals will descend on East London for this year’s Cepic Congress. Stock agencies will rub shoulders with heritage libraries, RM will square up to RF, and this year, more than ever, footage will sit next to still photography. Rather than events like fotofringe and Visual Connections, which attract picture buyers, the Cepic Congress is speed dating for picture archives. We rekindle relationships with existing suppliers and agents, strike up some new friendships and flirt with the competition.

It’s also usually an excuse to travel to somewhere within Europe and see some sights in the little free time that the Congress affords us. This will be my fourth Cepic. The first one I attended was Dresden and a visit from President Obama at the same time as Congress meant that the city was on lock down, with streets, manhole covers (and hotel room windows) sealed shut. Nevertheless we still managed a visit to the Frauenkirche and I got caught in a downpour so torrential I arrived back at the hotel drenched and with the face of my (supposedly waterproof) watch swimming in water.

My second year was Dublin (football and more rain). My third year was Istanbul (traffic jams, the incredible Hagia Sophia, and – thankfully – some sunshine). This year will be the curry houses of Brick Lane and an extremely easy commute by bus to the venue. In a way, it’s a shame that I’m not getting to see a new European city this year; however, it does mean I don’t have to get an 8am flight from Heathrow, which is a relief, and I get to sleep in my own bed at night. London is also doing its utmost to look its best, ready for the Jubilee (read: extra-long) weekend and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the summer.

When I first moved to London, I stayed briefly in North London, just past Finsbury Park, before heading east to Bethnal Green where I lived for a while in a very typical London terraced house with a Canadian housemate and a cat that was afraid of butterflies. The house was a street away from Columbia Road’s flower market. That whole area has become even more gentrified since I moved on ten years ago… maybe they were just waiting for me to leave before putting house prices up.

Brick Lane (and the Old Truman Brewery, venue for this year’s Congress) was a stone’s throw away, as was the original Spitalfield’s Market, which has since been developed and which, although it seems to me to have lost a lot of its original charm, pulls in a lot more punters now than it did the weekends I used to go to trawl through the bric-a-brac. Shoreditch and Hoxton are unrecongisable to me now and it takes me a while to get my bearings when wandering streets I used to know incredibly well. Fingers crossed I won’t lose my way when I am shepherding around Cepic out-of-towners next week.

It will be fascinating to see East London through the eyes of my Cepic colleagues next week. I find it hard not to be astonished by how upmarket it has become. Will my friends and colleagues see the same, or will they – especially those who live outside of large cities like London – see only the urban grime? It’s a fascinating area, ever-changing, filled with centuries of history. Just look at these images of East London and the City, all from our partner archive VIEW Pictures. Hard to think that all these views are within easy walking distance of one another!

So, bon voyage to all the Cepic delegates making their way to the UK. I can’t promise the sunshine we enjoyed in Istanbul, but I can promise a visit to one of the most diverse and exciting parts of our capital.

Seit einigen Wochen lasse ich mich beeindrucken von der Schönheit religiöser Architektur.

Nach wie vor arbeite ich mich durch das unglaubliche Archiv Anthony Kerstings (siehe auch Covent Garden Blog) und bin überzeugt, sein Werk muss eine der lückenlosesten fotografischen Dokumentationen religiöser Architektur in Großbritannien sein. Er fotografierte alle, angefangen bei der kleinen Pfarrkirche bis hin zu den großen Kathedralen in Ely, Lincoln oder Wells. Außerdem existieren jeweils Außen- und Innenaufnahmen und das zu unterschiedlichen Tages- und Jahreszeiten.

Ich bin immer wieder erstaunt über die Stärke religiöser Inbrunst, durch die diese beeindruckenden Gebäude entstanden sein müssen und die pure Willenskraft immer höhere und größere Gotteshäuser zu erschaffen. Dabei spielt es auch keine Rolle, wie man selbst Religiosität lebt oder die Kirche als Institution wahrnimmt. Ich widerspreche jedem, der sich nicht zumindest von der Größe und Pracht der Kirchen und Kathedralen beeindrucken lässt, die sich in Kerstings Aufnahmen widerspiegeln.

Mein erster Aufenthalt in Großbritannien als 16jährige, war eine Sprachreise mit dem Schulenglischkurs. Neben dem täglichen Sprachunterricht unternahmen wir viele Ausflüge durch die südlichen Grafschaften Englands. Natürlich besichtigten wir eine enorme Anzahl Kirchen und Kathedralen und ich erhielt einen ersten flüchtigen Eindruck von der majestätischen Architektur in Salisbury, Wells und Winchester um nur einige zu erwähnen. Ich wurde es nie wirklich leid, Kirchen zu besichtigen und noch immer versuche ich auf jeder meiner Reisen Zeit dafür einzuplanen. Ich bin zwar nicht besonders religiös, aber ich schätze sowohl die ruhige und  besänftigende Atmosphäre in den großen Kathedralen als ich auch die Größe und handwerkliche Kunst der Erbauer bestaune.

Ich fühle mich winzig neben den schlanken gotischen Türmen und unter den unermesslich hohen Gewölben einer Vielzahl der Kathedralen. Die ergreifende Atmosphäre, damals hervorgerufen durch hunderte Kerzen, die das Gold der Altarbilder erstrahlen liessen und den Klang der Predigt, der durch den gewaltigen Kirchenraum hallte, kann ich mir nur vorstellen.

Ich habe hier nur einige wenige Fotos als Vorschau heraus gesucht. Das Kersting-Archiv ist zu umfangreich, um ihm gerecht zu werden.

Bitte gehen Sie selbst auf die Suche  und lassen Sie sich auch beeindrucken. Wir stellen ständig neue Schätze seiner Kollektion online!

I’ve been overwhelmed in recent weeks by the power of religious architecture. As I am still working my way steadily through the late Anthony Kersting’s amazing archive (see also Covent Garden blog), I am convinced that his work must be one of the most complete photographic surveys of religious architecture in the UK. He photographed everything from local parish churches to the big cathedrals at Ely, Lincoln, Wells etc both inside and out at different times of the day and the seasons.

I am always amazed at the strength of religious fervour that must have inspired these stunning buildings and the sheer willpower to create ever taller and bigger structures to worship in. No matter how you feel about organised religion, I defy anyone not to be impressed by at least the size and grandeur of the churches and cathedrals Kersting has brought together in his work.

My first trip to the UK as a 16 year old was a language holiday organised by the English department of my school and besides daily lessons we also went on a great number of trips through the southern counties of England. Needless to say we visited a great number of cathedrals and I got my first glimpses of the majestic architecture at Salisbury, Wells and Winchester to name but a few. I never really got tired of visiting cathedrals and still try to make time for a few visits on any city trip I go on. I am not particularly religious but I do enjoy the quiet and calming atmosphere of the great cathedrals as well as marvelling at the size and craftmanship of it all. The gothic spires and immensely high vaulted ceilings of the huge cathedrals make me feel very small. I can only imagine what powerful religious atmosphere must have been created with hundreds of candles illuminating the gold of the altarpieces and the sound of the sermon echoing through the immense space.

I have put together only a very small selection of images as a taster, the size of Anthony’s archive is so much bigger than I could ever do it justice! Have a look for yourself – we will be adding to the treasures from his collection for a long while yet!

I have since read a very interesting article in a German newspaper – after the capitulation of Germany the Allies confiscated all films made after 1933, around 1240, which were than divided into categories A (can be shown), B (have to be edited and cut), and C (not to be shown at all). Apparently visible symbols of glorification of the military, Nazi ideology or the Wehrmacht were most important in the view of the Allies when categorising the films, sometimes even a suspicious title was enough. 219 films ended up in category C, now the number is more like 38 according to the German Murnau Foundation. The continuing ban on these films also creates a certain mysticism which is possibly more dangerous than showing them. The interest in these films are great – the Zeughaus cinema, part of the Berlin Historic Museum has had to turn many people away whenever such films have been shown.

Are we really not able to distinguish between a propaganda film and a documentary? Do we still have to be protected from the films, writings and even art of the Third Reich? It seems to me that the more something is forbidden, the more fascinating it becomes and the more power it gains – so when will we have a proper debate without being treated as if we can’t be trusted to make up our own minds? I realise this is a contentious issue and debates on how far films – or even video games – influence behaviour crop up again and again but I think it is high time to have more rational arguments. Otherwise – where do we stop? Should “Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffiths also be on some kind of blacklist? Personally, I expect most of these films from the 1930s and 1940s will be pretty boring, turgid and very obvious in their intentions and showing them will make them less interesting. What do you think?

Summer in London is fantastic (as long as the weather plays along) and a walk along the South Bank with sunglasses and an ice cream  on an August Sunday is hard to beat. But winter… London in winter can be a drab, depressing place, with periods of grey drizzle alternating with periods of heavy rain. The Thames takes on a murky brownness and people brace themselves in waterproof boots and tatty umbrellas.

We have been lucky these last few weeks. The weather has been cold and crisp, the winter sun surprisingly bright, and we have been treated to a few days of snow. Not a massive amount of snow, mind you, and Canadian colleagues and friends have been bemused by our tales of traffic gridlock and public transport meltdown at the merest flurry of snowflakes, but enough snow to settle on the ground and profoundly change the shape of the city, albeit briefly.

The way that snow alters the built environment is something that has fascinated me since I was seventeen and read Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo. In one of the stories - La città smarrita nella neve (The city lost in the snow) –  the title character wakes to find his city covered in snow. For Marcovaldo, a man more attuned to nature than the man-made world, the snow is an accomplice, hiding walls and roads underneath itself, making it impossible to see where one building starts and another stops.

Perhaps that’s why I love snow in the city so much: despite the bedlam it causes, it feels like nature reminding us who really has the power here. Those white otherworldly flakes reshape our pathways, obscure our buildings and slow us down in our workdays. In the city, you also get that wonderful orange glow at night, with the lights from street lamps reflecting against the white, so that it never truly gets dark. It really does remake the city and I am always disappointed when the thaw comes…. but at least there’s not long to go until summer!

George Valentin, the film’s protagonist, is modelled on Douglas Fairbanks (at least in my opinion!) and looking through images and film stills of Fairbanks certainly confirms it. I will leave you to make up your own mind – I have selected a few for comparison! It helps that Jean Dujardin has more than a passing physical resemblance to Fairbanks and his antics in the films he makes as Valentin show this even more clearly.

Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller is refreshing, sparkling, funny and very physical – this is another aspect of the film that I find wonderful: the acting is much more physical that we are now used to and there is an early scene in which Peppy steals into George’s dressing room to leave a thank you note and ends up using his coat as a stand-in for the star, a routine often used in pantomime. I could swear that everyone in the audience loved it even if it was familiar!

The story is a fairly simple one – George Valentin is the big star and Peppy Miller the fan who meets him in an almost slapstick moment; he helps her onto the first rung of the acting ladder and before long she surpasses him in popularity. She is the new, the talkative, and bubbly and pretty, he is the old, staid and silent, even if he doesn’t want to accept it. The fall and rise of the two main characters are parallel and underlined by the music, plenty of symbolism as well as the style of their wardrobe and cars. There is definitely a love story here but in the mould of old Hollywood – we don’t even see as much as a passionate kiss, yet the romance is plainly there.

Of course we can’t forget to mention Jack, George’s faithful dog who is also a co-star in all of his movies. He must surely be a nod to Asta in the “Thin Man” series but is also reminiscent of Eddie in “Frasier”, another star in his own right. Jack is an integral part of the movie and besides bringing a comic touch to the story; he is also responsible for some of the most moving moments.

So “The Artist” is homage to old Hollywood but is it any more than that? I believe so: there is one particular scene in which Valentin is having a nightmare, having been told by his producer that he has to speak in his next movie, he finds that he can’t but he can suddenly hear everyone else. It begins with the noise his glass makes when put down on a hard surface; the barking of the dog; a telephone ringing and an ever-growing band of giggling girls – the noise is jarring and overwhelming in an otherwise almost silent movie. I say almost as “The Artist” like all silent movies has a fabulous musical soundtrack underlining the action. This short scene certainly made me think of the noise we are confronted with daily, from telephones, to planes, cars and trains – it is very rare to find absolute quiet in our ever noisy world. It has become a white noise, always there in the background but if you force yourself to become aware of it, it can become overwhelming and I could feel for George in his nightmare. The whole scene seemed like a very appropriate comment on our modern world.

Having waited for so many months to see this film, I was a little worried that I might be disappointed but I definitely wasn’t – it is a great film! I hope that the buzz it has created might bring about a new appreciation for silent movies and if we are lucky, more opportunities to see them on the big screen with full orchestra in cinematic palaces of which there are only a few left.

Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, © The National Gallery, London / akg-images

From all of us to all of you:
Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noël, Merry Christmas!

The two men sitting opposite me on the southbound Northern Line train last night had possibly had a few too many drinks. Or maybe they were just naturally loud and slurring. Either way, it was impossible to ignore the conversation they were having about Kim Jong-il. Looking at a photograph of North Korean mourners in a copy of the Evening Standard, one said to the other:

“It’s incredible, just look at them all wailing!”
“Nah,” replied the other. “What you can’t see in that photograph are the ten men with AK-47s behind the mourners, forcing them to cry.”
“I don’t agree,” the first man continued. “It looks real, they’re really upset by his death. Can you imagine this country if the Queen died? Our reaction would be nothing like that, no one would be crying in the streets like that. That man had some power.”

Ever since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the resulting mass grief, I have tried not to second-guess the British public’s reaction to tragedy, but I do disagree with the first man’s comment about the death of the Queen: I think we would see a tremendous outpouring of anguish from most people in the UK.

However, it certainly is true that it would not – could not – be as extreme as what is happening in North Korea at the moment. It’s the perfect example of a truly successful cult of the personality. You can argue that there have been personality cults built up around rulers from the earliest recorded days: from the god-like Pharaohs of Egypt right up to the imperial extravagance of Napoleon I. You could even see the dissemination of portraits of Elizabeth I as Virgin Queen as a Tudor equivalent.

It seems to me, though, that it’s within the last hundred years that we have truly seen a rogues gallery’s worth of leaders harnessing the press, art and photography to shape an idealised image of themselves to their followers, from Stalin to Peron, Sun Yat-Sen to Saddam Hussein.

We have an extraordinary collection of images of Kim Jong-il in the archive courtesy of the photojournalist Alain Noguès who travelled in North Korea in 2000. Some of the paintings of the “supreme leader” that Noguès shot are staggering in their bombast: Kim standing strong against crashing waves; Kim smiling in the sunrise; Kim astride a white horse with his father and mother.

The paintings of Kim Jong-il reminded me of an excellent article by Eric Gibson I read a few years ago on the Wall Street Journal website, “Why Dictators Love Kitsch“. One of the points Gibson’s article makes is that this kitsch realist art is often an assembly-line production, art stripped of any artistic depth created purely to glorify the sitter in the most superficial (and largest) way possible.

The portraits of Kim Jong-il are not going to win the Turner Prize any time soon, but what interests me is how a pedestrian work of art can become totemic, wholly through the personality cult of the person it represents. The painting that comes to mind immediately is Hubert Lanziger’s equestrian portrait of Hitler (which Eric Gibson compares in his article to photos of Vladimir Putin horseriding). The Lanzinger portrait is, solely as a work of art, hideous: flat, with some half-baked foreshortening and metal armour which looks more like polyester satin. Look carefully at Hitler’s face and you’ll see the stab wound inflicted on the canvas by an Allied soldier at the end of the Second World War. A second-rate painting that nonetheless caused a violent reaction in the viewer, a second-rate painting still kept behind lock and key by the US military, a second-rate painting whose power comes not from the artist but from the sitter. These kitsch portraits of Kim Jong-il will no doubt soon be joined by equally kitsch portraits of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong-un and another cycle of totalitarian realist art will begin.

It was a plot twist I wasn’t expecting: suddenly footage of Harold Lloyd, Louise Brooks and Charlie Chaplin appeared on screen as the two young leads discovered more about the beginnings of film. When a clip of my personal hero Buster Keaton in The General appeared on screen I admit to having a tear in my eye.

The movie is interested in mechanics and machinery: Hugo’s father is a watchmaker; Papa Georges makes and mends toys; Hugo himself oils and winds countless clocks in the railway station; a professor of cinema hand-cranks an early projector. At the beginning of the film, Paris is laid out almost like the workings of a clock, and Hugo explains at one point that he loves machines because no part in a machine is unnecessary, every little cog and spring is needed. If Paris – and by extension the world – is a machine of which he is part, then he is necessary, even if he is alone.

Much of the plot hinges around a mysterious automaton repaired first by Hugo’s father and then by Hugo. The craze for automata seems to have really kicked off in the 18th Century, judging by the images we have in the archive of the chess-playing Mechanical Turk and Marie Antoinette’s mechanical musician. Some of the automata were frauds, of course, with real people hiding in or under them, controlling the action, but many others were feats of early computer technology, writing, drawing, playing music. Our fascination for robots that can act and think like humans continued, though The Tales of Hoffmann to Metropolis to, yes, Bobby the, er, cigarette vending machine.

We’re still obsessed with automata today, except we don’t necessarily expect them to look like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet. In an article for the Guardian about his new television series Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker recently admitted to his first ‘unironic conversation with a machine’, speaking to Siri on his iPhone:

“Today it’s Siri. Tomorrow it’ll be a talking car. The day after that I’ll be trading banter with a wisecracking smoothie carton. By the time I’m 70 I’ll be holding heartbreaking conversations with synthesised imitations of people I once knew who have subsequently died. Maybe I’ll hear their voices in my head. Maybe that’s how it’ll be.”

Speaking with Siri is an odd experience, especially in the UK where Siri shares the voice of the voiceover man from The Weakest Link. And it really is speaking with Siri rather than at Siri. We are reaching the point where we can have relatively complex interactions with computers. How long, as Charlie Brooker writes, will it be before we hear voices directly transmitted into our head?

I found the automaton in Hugo a beautiful but utterly creepy machine. Perhaps, as it was a Scorsese movie, I was expecting it to be a malevolent force (or, as it reminded me so much of Chucky, possessed by a malevolent force). Of course it wasn’t and – spoiler alert! – the film ends with a close-up of the automaton’s face. It was interesting to gauge the opinions of the children in the audience, all under ten and digital natives. Not one of them seemed fazed or scared by the creepy wind-up doll; Sacha Baron Cohen’s station inspector was much scarier to them. It seems like the future’s robotic, and the future generation is entirely comfortable with that!

Einer unserer Fotografen, Anthony Kersting, der leider kurz vor meinem Umzug nach Berlin verstarb, hinterließ ein unglaubliches Gesamtwerk.

Vor seinem Tod arbeiteten wir schon einige Jahre mit ihm zusammen und haben nun sein gesamtes Farbarchiv in unserem Berliner Hauptbüro unter Museumsbedingungen archiviert und gelagert: sicher und nutzbar für kommende Generationen.

Ich habe mich durch Kisten voller Fotos gearbeitet, dabei alte Schutzhüllen gegen neue Archivhüllen ausgetauscht, die Diapositive gereinigt und die meist großformatigen Ektachrome in neuen Archivboxen abgelegt. Diese Arbeit ist zwar ziemlich monoton aber merkwürdigerweise auch sehr beruhigend und es fühlt sich einfach gut an, mit analogem Bildmaterial zu arbeiten und sicherzustellen, dass die Sammlung in gutem Zustand aufbewahrt wird.

Anthony Kersting lebte sein ganzes Leben lang in South West London und so widmete ich mich zuerst seinen Londoner Fotos. Da ich hier selbst 20 Jahre gelebt habe, liebte ich es, die Dias anzusehen und vergangene Zeiten mit herrlich leeren Straße in verblassten Farben zu erforschen.

Gewöhnlich kann man anhand von Autos, verschwundenen Gebäuden oder Straßen, die heute ganz anders aussehen, Fotos gut datieren. Eine unglaubliche Wandlung aber vollzog sich rund um King´s Cross – ich fand ganze Fotoserien, aufgenommen aus dem selben Blickwinkel, die die Veränderung wirklich gut zeigen!

Manchmal finde ich alte Briefmarken auf den zur Aufbewahrung genutzten Briefumschlägen und in der Londonkiste A-C befand sich ein harmlos aussehender Umschlag, nur mit der Beschriftung Covent Garden Market. Im Umschlag waren nur Farbfotografien aus den 1960er Jahren von Covent Garden Market , als sich dort noch der Obst- und Gemüsemarkt befand. Ich war ziemlich erstaunt und sehr aufgeregt – scheinbar waren die Bilder nie aus den Hüllen herausgenommen worden und so veranlasste ich sofort ihre Archivierung und Digitalisierung.

Das sind die Momente, die die Arbeit in einem Archiv so wertvoll machen, vor allem wenn analoges Bildmaterial zu sichten und entdecken ist. Ich hoffe, wir werden niemals diesen Teil unserer Arbeit einbüßen!