A View from A Room

As briefly described in the post Writing on Trains, while taking my short excursion through Germany and Denmark, I was able to keep writing this blog mostly during the course of the various train journeys. Now in Stockholm for over a week, being static there is no longer the same propulsion to write with the cascade of new impressions; instead, a different set of impressions is created, not through novelty but by repetitions of now familiar rhythms.

Staying at Telefonplan, in the southern suburbs, the regular rhythms are the trains of the T14 Tunnelbana line - Stockholm's light rail system. Due to the landscape that the city is built upon, these trains frequently move from above ground to underground (as the name suggests) and back again. Directly outside the two windows of the room I am in, immediately parallel to the road this building is on, the railway line comes out of a cutting from Telefonplan station, bounded by a rocky outcrop on one side, and pass over a bridge crossing a road, before going into a tunnel into the hill bounding the horizon. This hill, with some apartment buildings among bare trees and some evergreens on the ridge, is just conceivably reminiscent of an Italian landscape, firs or pines standing in for cypresses, of the kind Northern European artists were seeking out in the late 18th and early 19th century (such as Thomas Jones or C. W. Eckersberg). This is the scene that I've drawn on two of the postcards. At different times of day, the trains' frequency changes, and during busy morning and early evening periods, the regular T-bana trains are joined by older rolling stock, announced by a slightly higher pitched whine. These blue trains have a near-generic look of many European cities' light rail trains, such as classic Paris Metro trains, older Berlin (or Hamburg) U-bahn trains - boxy, unstreamlined, with ridged metal panels, rounded corners to the narrow windows on the doors, individual seats, bare metal pillars and handles.

Although there was snow on the first morning after my arrival, the weather has turned fine since and the passing of the day is figured by the changing direction of the sun harshly back-lighting the scene during the height of the day, throwing the rocks and concrete of the embankment into sharp relief during the evenings with a parallel direction to the road and railway. A series of flags outside provide a regular snapping sound of ropes against poles in the wind.

The architecture at Telefonplan has an unadorned utility that is hard to date: large tall blocks of many floors with regular grids of windows, the brutal bare concrete tower that dominates the local skyline. Small details betray something of their age: the extensive use of terrazzo, for window sills as well as stairs, the small amount of wood in a few areas, and the tapered pillars outside. In the Spårvägsmuseet, Stockholm's transport museum, there was a display of photographs by Sven Goliath (1918-1989), which included a shot of Telefonplan from 1954, clearly showing the concrete tower and existing buildings very much as they are today. The whole complex which now includes offices, the art school, and accommodation and other services used to be the headquarters of Ericsson, and a bust of L. M. Ericsson stands on the corner diagonally opposite the station, next to one of the curious public telephones of the Rikstelefon with its odd flared lattice base. The main factory and office buildings were designed by Ture Wennerholm and built 1938-40; the 70 metre high tower was added after the Second World War, and designed by C. Dahl Steffensen. The tower is referred on the Swedish Wikipedia page about the Ericsson factory at Telefonplan to by the compound word kortvågsforskning, which translates as 'short-wave research' - this must be for microwave transmissions, the impetus behind the Kaknästornet written about under 'Panoramania'. The tower is not open to the public; however, opening a door at the end of a corridor on the top floor - the seventh floor - of the accommodation block, led into the adjoining building, into a stairwell that went as high as the 13th floor, halfway up the height of the Telefonplan tower opposite.

Flea markets

Since being in Stockholm I have been to two of the local flea markets: the Sunday market at Hötorget, and the all-week around market, Loppmarknaden at Vårberg. The overall quality of the stalls at Hötorget was better, but the prices were much higher, and as a consequence, although I saw a number of items of interest, all were too expensive. At Loppmarknaden, which is an underground hall in the shopping complex attached to Vårberg station, some of the stalls were little more than just piles of household rubbish, and presented as such. The market charges an entry fee at weekends, but I went on a weekday. It's possible that it may be busier, and with more stalls at the weekend. There was a good deal of furniture and furnishings from the 1950s-60s-70s, which holds onto a use value for longer than items generally thought of as technology, where the turnover is more rapid: VHS players, portable CRT televisions, sterograms, many early digital cameras, game consoles and games, and whole boxes of remote controls and chargers.

The flea market neatly brings together the flaneur and the objet trouvé. London is poor in this regard, perhaps due to knowing the price of everything. In the UK, the car boot sale is the nearest native equivalent, yet the car boot sale rarely produces the same feelings of felicity and serendipity. Possibly at one time, the wares for sale could have said something specific about the society in which they are found (but these flea markets are becoming more universalised across different countries, which in itself suggests homogenisation) - by what society can't quite bring itself to throw away and eke some last monetary value from. One feels that some of this junk simply circulates.

As usual, I was interested in cameras, photographic equipment and related items. There were many digital cameras from about a decade ago, a number of older SLRs, but the only camera that caught my eye, was an Agfa Isolette III. This looked in good condition, although a bit dusty, and everything worked except for the uncoupled rangefinder, which was stuck, and I may be able to repair this, but what piqued my interest sufficiently to buy it was the half-used roll of film inside. The seller wanted (and got) 200 SEK, just over £15. A few years ago I bought a Werra camera from the Mauerpark Flohmarkt in Berlin (the best flea market I have been to), which had a roll of half-used film inside. Despite opening the back and exposing the film, I was able to shoot the remaining film to get some images of the flea market on the camera I had just bought, and recover the undeveloped images, dormant for many years before the camera passed into my hands. Similarly, I finished the roll of film in the Isolette at Vårberg.

The Reisekamera

“Young Smith, the Secretary of our Photographic Club, called at nine to ask me to take him a negative of the statue of the dying Gladiator in the Munich Sculpture Gallery.  I told him that I should be delighted to oblige him, but that I did not intend to take my camera with me. “Not take your camera!” he said.  “You are going to Germany—to Rhineland!  You are going to pass through some of the most picturesque scenery, and stay at some of the most ancient and famous towns of Europe, and are going to leave your photographic apparatus behind you, and you call yourself an artist!” He said I should never regret a thing more in my life than going without that camera.”

 Diary of a Pilgrimage, Jerome K. Jerome

Photography has been intrinsically linked to travel since its very beginnings. The camera itself, before the invention of photography, was already in use as a travelling companion for artists and amateurs, cameras obscura being manufactured in portable versions, and the camera lucida appearing in 1807. An early amateur user of the camera lucida, William Henry Fox Talbot was frustrated with his lack of skill in drawing when attempting to make pictures at Lake Como in 1833. This European travel was a resumption of the idea of the aristocratic Grand Tour, made bourgeois, a benefit of the peace that followed the Congress of Vienna. Famously, he desired that the scene to be able to draw itself:

"...the idea occurred to me... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remained fixed upon the paper!"

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature

Interestingly, he also used a camera obscura, with waxed paper to trace the utlines of an image upon; this works very differently from the camera lucida, which does not project the image, and the former device leads more directly to the invention of photography. Concurrently, in France, Niépce had made his own experiments, but conceived of photography primarily as a medium to reproduce existing works of art; Daguerre, who took up Niépce's work, had previously invented the diorama, a spectacular form of entertainment, noted for its changing lighting effects, that competed with the panorama - and, like the panorama, was capable of bringing distant lands to a sophisticated urban audience.

Despite all the technological difficulties of a truly mobile photography, from the beginnings of the wet plate photograph, the camera travelled - alongside a mobile darkroom. Glass plates had to be coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, and then exposed in the camera while this emulsion was still wet and subsequently developed. Photographic expeditions in the 19th century were very much in the mould of imperial explorations, with mule trains, handlers, camp equipment and such like, up to the point of the formulation of the dry plate. These could be bought from specialist manufacturers in bulk, exposed in the camera, then developed at leisure when the photographer returned. Shortly afterwards, towards the close of the 19th century, the Kodak camera was produced, and, together with flexible roll film, defined photography for much of the century to come. A symbol of the affinity between travel and photography was the fact that many cameras were named with such associations: the Reisekamera - literally "travel-camera" -  was an early, more mobile version of a studio plate camera. This idea became more prevalent as photography became increasingly available to the widest sections of society. There are at least five different cameras that use the word tourist in their names; four different traveler cameras (and one traveller);  a couple of explorers; the Russian Sputnik camera may have been named for the satellite, but 'sputnik' can be literally translated as "travelling companion"; and a great number of 'scout', usually box, cameras, with all the implications of camping and the outdoors.

The first time I used a camera, that I was given a camera to use - I presume I must have shown an interest in doing so - was in 1983, on holiday, camping in France. These very first photographs were taken with a Kodak Instamatic 50, making square photographs using the old 126 cartridge format (my mother had just been given a new 35mm SLR camera, and indeed, I'd forgotten about these early photographs for many years).

In Paris in 1994, with my then nearly new (to me) secondhand Praktica SLR, I shot five rolls of film, all black and white, the first negatives that I developed in the darkroom at my college on my degree. Looking back at the contact sheets, the images are (mostly) of subjects I would not now take photographs of - both the subjects, or their framings, specifically. There are lots of photographs of statuary, perhaps not surprising for my first experience of Paris. Notably, I went to the Louvre and didn't go to see any paintings at all, just sculpture. The sculpture stood in for missing human subjects, and the images ended up being used in photo-collages and etchings, including a series of photo-collages made at home over the Christmas break. I was also interested in the medium of the artist book at the time, which I made from original photographs, photocopies, and ephemeral material collected from the journey. However, these became exercises in empty aestheticism: I was looking to create complicated imagery that suggested meaning, without containing it. It was a lack of confidence that I could not let the photographs exist on their own merits.

In the years since I have always travelled with a camera. This in itself is not remarkable, especially now that almost everyone has some form of camera as part of a modern communication device. In Abroad, Paul Fussell uses the absence of photography as a distinguishing characteristic:

"...it is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. A way to combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist. Despite the suffering he undergoes, the anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler [Fussell makes distinctions between explorers, travellers, and tourists]: his motive is not inquiry but self protection and vanity. [...] A useful trick is ostentatiously not carrying a camera. If asked about this deficiency by a camera-carrying tourist, one scores points by saying, "I never carry a camera. If I photograph things I don't really see them."

It is too simplistic to reduce experiences of looking in combination with photographing to the binary oppositions of the anti-tourist. For a time, perversely, I took a number of trips accompanied only by an old 35mm stereo camera. The severe limitations of using this format made sense for a time, but the camera wasn't very reliable. On more recent journeys I've taken a 35mm camera, a folding medium format camera, and some form of subminiature camera too.

Using film does mean not being able to see one's results immediately, usually not until after returning home. The photograph's function as an aide memoire is reinforced in the process of developing and revisiting images which may have been present in the viewfinder for a fraction of a second. Polaroids of course share a near-instantaneous aspect with digital photography: in Wim Wenders Alice In The Cities, Philip uses a Polaroid camera to photograph the surfaces of America, specifically the innovative SX-70, then relatively new, using integral film (not peel-apart negatives and positives which previous instant cameras used); Dennis Hopper in The American Friend photographs himself with a Polaroid. Leaving the development of film until later always provides an anxiety, however small, that something may go wrong with the film. Thus the undeveloped film is a precious cargo, a repository of memories and locations. On my journey through Brussels, Cologne, Wuppertal, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm, I've shot a number of rolls of film in all three formats. Their contents will reveal themselves in the course of time.

Postcards 2

Stockholm 4-6/4/15

Stories

When Alice and Philip alight from the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, they find a hotel almost opposite the station entrance on Sonnborner Strasse. The girder of the Schwebebahn, which in this section is suspended above the road, lies directly outside of the window of the hotel room. A train goes past as Philip tells Alice when she has asked for a bedtime story, "I don't know any stories". Philip Winter, played by Rüdiger Vogler, in Alice In The Cities is introduced to the audience as a writer in the first part of the film, before he meets Alice and her mother, although he has been unable to write while in America; returning to Europe with Alice appears to provide inspiration and motivation for him to write. As Bruno Winter in Kings Of The Road, he repairs cinema projectors; Philip Winter returns as a private detective several years later in Until The End Of The World and Faraway, So Close!, and finally as a sound engineer in Lisbon Story. It might be fair to assume that Rüdiger Vogler stands in for Wim Wenders (even as a different character - to match his different occupations as Winter - in the middle film of the 'road movies trilogy', The Wrong Move), not as an alter ego perhaps, but something of a specifically German everyman, born into the same 1940s generation as Wenders, who came of age in a divided Germany in the 1960s.

After announcing that he knew no stories, Philip relents and begins, ”Once there was a man" but after an interruption he corrects himself and starts again: "Once there was a little boy who got lost”. Each 'figure' in Philip’s story - like a musical figure - passes in succession, seemingly with only its linear sequence to connect it with the statement before, which has echoes of the structure of the road movie itself: "and then..." - "and then" Alice asks when there is a pause. This emphasises the clear storyness of the story, its episodic motifs tumbling past each other as Philip improvises its forward movement long enough for Alice to fall asleep. The soundtrack theme by Can re-appears and Philip closes the window to mute the sound of the Schwebebahn.

Since the hugely successful Paris, Texas, it sometimes feels that the stories are imposed on Wim Wenders films: in contrast, with the best of his films from the 1970s, the story, or the narrative, was rather more contingent on character and location, even with those films with external sources, his 'B-films': The American Friend's Jonathan Zimmermann in Hamburg, or Wilhelm Meister moving through 1970s West Germany in The Wrong Move. In later films, character and location become subservient to the narrative - Wings Of Desire being a case in point: despite its reputation, with its self-defining seriousness, it has none of the sure lightness of touch that makes Alice In The Cities such a joy. Despite a few directorial mis-steps, Lisbon Story, a later exception, touches these contingencies again. In recent years, Wenders is more happy as a documentarian: here, the material can be shaped from the outside, rather than from the inside in a fictional narrative.

On the train to St Petersburg nineteen months ago, as passengers' travel documents were checked by passport and customs controls, the man seated at our table, who had pronounced crossing the border, "very John le Carre", told us the bare outline of a fascintating story:

"The train stops at Vyborg. Russian customs (in green) and passport/visa control in black, with forage caps and all that we saw were female. The passenger sitting adjacent, next to T- proffered the information that he used to live here, in Vyborg, that it wasn't a very Russian city, having been Finnish and under Swedish control. [We later saw that he had a Norwegian passport and spoke fluent Russian to the customs officials.] He told us that he had met a woman about ten years ago, who was 113, living in a Soviet era apartment with her daughters, in their eighties. She had been married and had a family before the Russian Revolutions of 1917. She had been a prisoner of war [in the second world war] captured by the Germans, and had been in a camp in Kaliningrad. He said that it had been [a] German [city and he couldn't think of the name]. I was able to offer that it had been known as Königsberg. He said that she had told him at the end of the war she had walked home to Vyborg "on her own two legs". He had said he'd asked her if she had any photographs, documentation of this remarkable journey. She had said that photographs were the last thing on her mind."

Later, the man went to the buffet car saying something along the lines of the fact that one could always find better company there - I think we weren't convivial or gregarious enough fellow passengers for him. The short few sentences about the 113-year old woman were bound up with a century's worth of upheavals in ideology, history and nation states themselves. Vyborg, where the train was stopped, had been Viipuri when Finnish, which it had been when this woman would have been born in 1890. As part of the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was ruled by the Tsar, but with a relative amount of autonomy; it then became part of an independent Finland after the civil war following the revolutions of 1917. After the Winter War, the Soviets captured and annexed Vyborg; it then briefly returned to Finnish control with the Continuation War, and finally became part of the Soviet Union once again, and was recognised as such with the Moscow Peace Treaty.

The location where the woman had been held as a prisoner of war had a similarly complicated twentieth century history. Königsberg was the major city of East Prussia, and at the beginning of the century this was a contiguous part of Germany itself, seat of the Hohenzollerns who became the emperors of a united Germany. After the First World War, this became an enclave, cut off from Germany by the Polish corridor, which stretched across former Prussian lands to the Baltic Sea. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allies determined to simplify the map of Europe by forcing the mass migration of Germans into the redrawn boundaries of post-war Germany, a form of ethnic cleansing designed to forestall any future conflicts of expansion. East Prussia was ceded to the Soviet Union and its German identity erased. Königsberg became Kaliningrad, and by an irony of fate, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Kalinigrad Oblast became an enclave once again, remaining Russian, while now surrounded by the EU countries of Poland and Lithuania

"There is something extraordinary about the decision of the Allied control council, in February 1947, to abolish the state of Prussia by an act of law. Unlike most laws issued by the council, this one has a miniature history lesson in the preamble. It says Prussia, which had since times of yore been the seat of reaction and militarism, is hereby demolished. The explanation for the law is in its wording. The state is seen as the source of militarism and reaction in German history and for that reason it has to be exorcised from the European map. It is an unquiet spirit that must be dispelled."

Christopher Clark, quoted in Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation

Living in the United Kingdom, an island with 'natural' geographical borders, although with the contentions of Ireland and to a lesser degree Scotland, brings with it a sense of national identity that does not necessarily need to be questioned. It is hard therefore to imagine what it may be like to live in contested lands, especially in the last century or so of the nation state - essentially a recent concept, but one that it would be difficult to conceive of a world without: in certain parts of Europe boundaries and allegiances have changed numerous times in the last one hundred years. However, with closer integration within the EU, perhaps regional identities - within being 'European' - will begin to feel more important than national identities, much as a writer like Stefan Zweig may have felt before the outbreak of the First World War.

As light relief, in Jerome K. Jerome's Diary of A Pilgrimage, he recounts being stuck in a train carriage with a very talkative man, who tells a long story about a dog, which remained undefined by its shagginess or not, but this feels knowing:

“After the dog story, we thought we were going to have a little quiet.  But we were mistaken; for, with the same breath with which he finished the dog rigmarole, our talkative companion added: “But I can tell you a funnier thing than that—” We all felt we could believe that assertion.  If he had boasted that he could tell a duller, more uninteresting story, we should have doubted him; but the possibility of his being able to relate something funnier, we could readily grasp. But it was not a bit funnier, after all.  It was only longer and more involved.  It was the history of a man who grew his own celery; and then, later on, it turned out that his wife was the niece, by the mother’s side, of a man who had made an ottoman out of an old packing-case.”

Jerome K. Jerome, Diary of a Pilgrimage