Week 12 in Germany & Austria
Final week for the 🇩🇪 🇦🇹 summer
Posts tagged ‘Cologne’
23 for 23: Foto(ein)s in 2023
Above/featured: Vienna’s green vineyards on Nussberg, with Kahlenberg at centre in the background. Photo, 14 Jun 2023.
A year in review typically provides coverage spanning a period of six months or more; the period doesn’t even have to be a continuous stretch. But in this case, my highlights come solely from a period of six weeks in May and June. All else pales by comparison.
All of the images presented below have been corrected for geometric distortion and rotation, with further adjustments to image-crop, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, sharpness, vibrance, saturation, and colour levels. These images are as always best viewed on screens larger than a miniscule mobile.
22 for 22: Foto(ein)s for 2022
Above/featured: Vienna skyline from Kleinwasserkraftwerk Wehr I in early morning light. Photo, 7 Jun 2022.
For 2022, the act of looking forward and backward is dominated by a 4-week stay in the city of Vienna. In between the collected images is a reclaimed longing for the Austrian capital to which I was first introduced 20 years ago, but for which there was no camera and, sadly, no recorded pixels.
I’ve already described a set of images setting the urban scenes in Vienna from 2022. Below is an additional set of 22 images selected from a period of 35 days; the time interval represents only 10% of the year, but it appears to be a personally important “watershed moment” as well.
My Cologne: wandering the streets in Ehrenfeld
For many, the German city of Cologne brings to mind the Cathedral, Karneval, and perfumed water.
For me, Cologne brings to mind great friends, tasty Turkish nibbles, football side 1. FC Köln, and Ehrenfeld.
My friend Y wanted to test her new camera on the streets, and when she suggested the Ehrenfeld neighbourhood, I readily agreed. My many visits to this city on the Rhine have frequently ended up in Ehrenfeld that’s largely Turkish and working class, an immigrant blue-collar area with which I readily identify and it’s why Ehrenfeld is my K-‘hood.
My Cologne: there’s a lighthouse that never goes out
Above/featured: Mural of the Helios structure, Köln Ehrenfeld, 9 Jan 2013 (450D).
Why is there a lighthouse located in the middle of the city? That makes no sense!Did the Rhine river once flow here? Is that why there’s a lighthouse?
Is the structure some kind of forgotten remnant of the past?
Maybe that’s not a lighthouse, but rather a beacon that lets people know about a fire somewhere in the neighbourhood.
These are some of the questions and statements posed by Cologne residents when asked if they know anything about the lighthouse in their midst.
Located in the Ehrenfeld1 borough of Cologne is a red brick 44-metre (144-foot) high lighthouse. But why is there a lighthouse at all in the “middle” of Cologne? The Rhine river flows through the city, but the river is hardly visible from the lighthouse at a distance of about 3 kilometres (2 miles). The structure is not an actual operating lighthouse; it’s a symbol of early 20th-century enterprise from what was once one of the most important companies in Europe and marking the location of a big factory that once manufactured electrical equipment including maritime lights.
Founded in 1882, Helios2 established their presence in the town of Ehrenfeld before the latter was incorporated into the greater city of Cologne in 1888. The company once boasted a staff complement of over 2000 people, with products sold in Germany and Europe ranging from electrical generators and transformers, light bulbs, light fixtures in public spaces, and electrical streetcars. Helios also built light towers for the North and Baltic Sea coastlines, including ones at Roter Sand (Weser river estuary), Borkum and Wangerooge (East Frisian Islands), and Sylt. The onsite lighthouse in Ehrenfeld was constructed as a testing facility and never used as a navigational aid or marker. The company overextended its financial reach until Berlin’s AEG3 purchased Helios in 1905. Manufacturing operations in Ehrenfeld ceased in 1930, bringing a final end to Helios’ business presence in Cologne.
The present-day buildings which remain are used as office- and art-space. As historical landmark, the “Helios Leuchtturm” remains as part of the urban heritage in Ehrenfeld and Cologne. If the people in both borough and city have any final say in the matter, the lighthouse will never have to go out.4
Fotoeins Fotografie 