Altdeutsche Weinstube — Hotel photography
Traditional restaurant and wine tavern photography. Hotel photography: Rüdesheim. A set of the guest rooms at the Altdeutsche Weinstube in Rüdesheim. A…
A set of the guest rooms at the Altdeutsche Weinstube in Rüdesheim. What was photographed is not the dining rooms but the house above the tavern: double rooms with green accents under the sloping ceiling, a family room with a picture book, a teddy and a stuffed crocodile on the bed, a bathroom with a rain shower, a room in dusky pink.
Small details do part of the telling — the suitcase beside the bed, the little bottle of perfume at the washstand, the open page of the picture book. They show a room as habitable rather than merely clean, and that is the whole difference between a hotel photograph and a receipt for the cleaning company. A perfectly empty room answers the question “is it tidy”; a room with a suitcase in it answers the question “do I want to go there”.
What matters is that the props belong to the house and not to the photographer. A crocodile and a teddy on the family bed say children are welcome here. Two glasses and a bottle on the same bed would have sold the identical room to a different audience. So before the first frame there is a conversation about who is meant to sleep in this room.
The sloping ceiling is the technical problem. Under a slope there is no standpoint from which the whole bed and the full height fit without tilting the camera up or down — and the moment it tilts, the slope becomes a wedge and the room looks lower than it is. So the camera stays level, lower than usual, and the crop takes less ceiling rather than more.
The light comes from the roof windows and the bedside lamps, and the two are different colors. The frames are made at the time of day when the windows are not glaring, and the warm lamps stay on: they are the reason a room under the roof reads as cozy rather than cramped.
- Place
- Rüdesheim
