Arbeitsbücher und Urlaubsfotos

German photograph album and school workbook, vintage paper, found objects

Last month I was back in one of my usual junk shops and found these gems tucked away in an old cardboard box.

It’s not every trip that I find something worth buying. I can’t tell how often these shops (I’ve got three-four that I visit regularly, and should find a few more) get new stock. None of them specialises or even seems to care about the papers, though they will haggle over photo albums, especially the black & white ones. The papers are frequently underneath a stack of LPs, thrown together with manuals from 50-year-old hifi systems, or amongst a stack of old encyclopedias.

The album documents more than one trip from Berlin to Bayern, the state (Bundesland) containing Nürnberg, Sulzbach-Rosenberg, and Hanhbach (all visited, per the photographs). At least one of the trips took place in 1964, the others aren’t dated.

I’m utterly fascinated by these two workbooks, though I have idea what they contain. The smaller appears to be dated from 1971, and the larger, 3-ring binder from 1941-1942. The writing in the binder is, I think, in German Kurrent script (deutsche Kurrentschrift), which was the standard handwriting style from the early 1900s until 1941, when the NSDAP (Nazi Party) issued a Normalschrifterlass, abolishing (though not entirely) gothic, blackletter, and other “degenerate” forms of handwriting and typography.

These books haven’t made it to the studio yet. I’ll want to find a project that in some way preserves their original form, while also bringing them out of these dusty notebooks sitting around my apartment.

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Collection and Collage

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Zehn Fotos, Mai