Stuttgart | Fotoeins Fotografie

Uhlbach, Grabkapelle auf dem Württemberg, Württemberg, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday, Stuttgart: Uhlbacher Weingärten

From the top of Württemberg hill in Stuttgart, this east view faces the village of Uhlbach in the city district of Obertürkheim. The hills are covered in vineyards; among them are white-wine grape varieties Burgunder, Herold, Kerner, Müller Thurgau, Riesling, and Trollinger.

I made the image above on 20 Jul 2024 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime and the following settings: 1/500-sec, f/11, ISO1000, and 18.5mm focal length (28mm full-frame equivalent). This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-wyN.

Stuttgart’s Gerda Taro

Travel day 76, Euro day 75.

I’m in Stuttgart for a few days, and I rediscover photographer Gerda Taro was born in the city. I’d already read some history of photography, including the Spanish Civil War and Gerda Taro as the first woman to photograph and publish images about open conflict. I’ve gone looking for some traces in the city of her birth, as a quick and spontaneous mini-project in the midst of 90 consecutive days in Europe.

Memorial, near Olgaeck

Near the bus and tram stop Olgaeck is Gerda Taro Plaza, in memory of the young woman photographer who was born “Gerta Pohorylle” in Stuttgart and who once lived with her family in the area. At the plaza is a 2014 memorial dedicated to Taro; the text on all nine panels is entirely in German.

*Named for photographer Gerda Taro (1910-1937), the plaza was unveiled by the city in 2008, and redesigned in 2014 with the installation of the memorial.*

*“O”. Gerda Taro, a pioneer in war photography.*

*“R”*. *The 1920s: Jazz, Theater, and the Stuttgart Kickers.*

*“A”*. *Leipzig: distributing leaflets against Hitler.*

*“T”. Exile in Paris: meeting André Friedmann, and the creation of Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. There is no Capa without Taro.*

*“A”. The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.*

*“D”. Barricades, armed women, equitable distribution of land.*

*“R”. The camera as witness: misery and terror from bombs.*

*“E”. Getting up close, for the world at large.*

“G”. The first woman war-photographer killed on location. Documenting Spain’s civil war with her camera, Gerda Taro was accidentally run over by a tank and died from her injuries in a hospital near Madrid on 26 July 1937. She was buried in a marked grave in Paris’ Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

*Republican militia women training on the beach outside Barcelona, Spain: photo by Gerda Taro, August 1936. Provided by Ur Cameras on Flickr via Creative Commons.*

Family home

Not far from Gerda-Taro-Plaza, I found the Pohorylle family’s former home, based on this poignant essay. I didn’t see any Gedenktafel (memorial plaque) or any Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) in the pavement, at or in front of either building 170 or 170A. In 1929, when Gerta was 19 years old, the Pohorylle family moved from Stuttgart to Leipzig.

*Obstructed view of the former Pohorylle family house (in light orange), as seen from passage off Cottastrasse.*

*Gate to path access for building address Alexanderstrasse 170A.*

*Former Pohorylle family house, at Alexanderstrasse 170A.*

Taro, short bio

Born Gerta Pohorylle, 1910 in Stuttgart, Germany; died 1937 in El Escorial, Spain.

“… Studied in Leipzig starting in 1929. Emigrated to Paris in 1933. In 1935 began working with the photographer André Friedmann, later known as Robert Capa. In 1935-1936 worked for the Alliance Photo Agency. Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936, she and Capa went to Spain; other photography assignments in Spain followed in early 1937. She was fatally wounded at the Brunete front in July 1937 and was the first female war correspondent killed in action.”

Source: “Women War Photographers: from Lee Miller to Anja Niedringhaus” (Munich: Prestel, 2019), p. 218.

I made all photos above with an iPhone15 on 22 Jul 2024. I received no support from an external organization. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

24T76 Some Stuttgart from the city centre

E75

I spent travel day 76 (Euro day 75), mostly in Stuttgart’s city centre. By early afternoon having relearned something I found out years ago, I began a new “mini-project” for the final visits of the day; that 1-off will appear at a later date.

*What’s now Schillerplatz with the Schiller statue was once home to an original stud farm called Stuotgarten (c. 950 CE), giving the future city its name*.

*Towards the Rathaus (City Hall) with its modern clock tower.*

*1111am on 22 July; moon just past full and into waning gibbous phase.*

*Inside Stuttgart’s Rathaus: the famous “Paternoster” elevator in service for employees, residents, and visitors like me. Of course, I used it to go up and down.*

*Next to the Rathaus is this statue “STUTTGARDIA”; see below.*

*Inside the Markthalle (market hall), with a great abundance of meats and cheese.*

*I arrived at Herr Kächele, hungry for Maultaschen. I got so much more …*

… with their big “Schwabenteller” (Swabian plate combo), including from left to right: potato salad, meat patty with gravy, regional specialty Maultaschen, cheese Spätzle. Washed it all down with a black currant juice spritzer. All made locally with locally sourced ingredients.

*The massive and ongoing “Stuttgart21” central train station redevelopment project.*

*Marienplatz, in Stuttgart Süd: the arrival of the “Zacke” city cogwheel railway.*

City route 10 operates as the “Zacke” cogwheel railway between Marienplatz and Degerloch until 845pm, after which a substitute bus rolls out into service at 9pm. It’s a steep climb south which is why the cogwheel is effective.

*The SSB is the city’s transport provider: Stuttgarter Strassenbahnen AG*.

I made all photos above with an iPhone15 on 22 Jul 2024. I received no support from an external organization. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

24T75 Kepler’s birthtown, Weil der Stadt

E74

In fairness, I’m gonna nerd out here.

In high school, physics and mathematics were speaking clearly to me in a language that helped explain a piece of the world I struggled to understand; I had many unanswered questions. Later at many academic institutions, the choices I made continued to satisfy my ongoing curiosity. Over the course of my training, Johannes Kepler is one of many names whose scientific work made “sense” and provided some “ordered logic” to my (naive and incomplete) perception of “illogic” and “nonsense.”

What I didn’t know is that decades later, I’m interested in discovering and finding the physical traces for those names. I still have questions, but they no longer involve difficult calculations. Instead, it’s about the “math” of how individuals reach their destinations.

I’m on a train heading out from Stuttgart, not to the famous car museums, but to a town where Johannes Kepler was born. There’s no doubt in my mind this has become a kind of pilgrimage.

*With S-Bahn Stuttgart S6 train service, Weil der Stadt is a 40-minute trip from Stuttgart.*

*Kepler-Denkmal (1870) am Marktplatz / Kepler memorial (1870) at the town’s market square.*

*Inauguration of the Kepler memorial on 24 June 1870. Stadtmuseum (town museum) collection.*

In Weil der Stadt, the Kepler-Museum is inside the house where Johannes Kepler was born in 1571. In 1576, the Kepler family moved out from Weil der Stadt and to the nearby town of Leonberg. The museum not only summarizes Kepler’s timeline but also highlights a number of key influences on Kepler, as well as his scientific contributions.

*Copernicus view: the heliocentric model of the solar system; idea also attributed to Greek astronomer Aristarch of Samos from 3rd-century BCE.*

*Aware of Copernicus’ work, Kepler’s own thoughts and ideas were greatly influenced by the Copernicus model of a Sun-centric solar system.*

*Undoubtedly thanks to the long arduous work by Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s 1627 orbit-data tables for the planets were the most accurate of its time.*

With the introduction of the “logarithm” as a mathematical tool by John Napier in 1617, Kepler realized his own calculations became simpler (because, power laws!) and published supplementary data using logarithms.

*Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 1st Law. “Each planet’s orbit is in the shape of an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.*”

*Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 2nd Law. “An object in an elliptical orbit around the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.”*

Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 3rd Law. “For an object in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, the time to complete one full orbit is U (T) and the ellipse’s semi-major axis (or average distance) is A. The relationship between U and A is that the square of the period (U^2) is directly proportional to the cube of the average distance (A^3).”

*“Keplerstadt: Weil der Stadt.” Inside Weil der Stadt Bahnhof.*

I made all photos above with an iPhone15 on 21 Jul 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

24T74 Stuttgart: home of the Württembergs

E73

When I moved to Heidelberg in 2001, I wondered about the origins of the name of the German federal state Baden-Württemberg. I learned about Baden, a strip of land with French roots and bordering the Rhine river. But where was Württemberg?

In Stuttgart today, I went up a hill on which there used to be a family’s ancestral castle. What replaced the castle is a sepulchral memorial chapel, which today masters a grand view of Stuttgart city and the Neckar river valley, as well as vineyards surrounding the hill.

The name Wirtemberg and subsequently Württemberg applied to the area, region, and now, the German federal state. It’s no surprise Stuttgart is the state capital city (Landeshauptstadt).