Frankfurt International Trophy — Wine Competition

Event photography for the Frankfurt International Trophy, the wine competition in Frankfurt am Main. The Frankfurt International Trophy, held on 8 and 9 April…

The Frankfurt International Trophy, held on 8 and 9 April 2022 at the Gesellschaftshaus Palmengarten. For two days the historic hall with its chandeliers, red columns and running gallery becomes a tasting room: long rows of white tables, the flags of the competing nations along the balconies, hundreds of judges between them. The set starts outside at the white façade and ends at the lectern in front of a full house.

A competition looks like nothing from the outside. People sit at tables, smell glasses and write something down. What creates the significance in the room — the size of the hall, the flags overhead, the sheer number of tables — has to be fetched into the frame deliberately. Hence the tall shot that runs up past a Polish flag, on over Portugal and Spain, into the stucco ceiling, showing the hall only in the distance. It is the only frame that gets the age of the building and the internationality of the event into one rectangle.

The light is mixed and cannot be unified: warm chandeliers above, cold daylight through the high windows, stage lights on the truss. In a listed hall none of it can be gelled or taped over. So each frame decides which source is allowed to be right — daylight for the wines, because otherwise the color in the glass goes wrong; the warm light for the wide shots, because that is how the room looks.

What usually gets left out of event sets is photographed too: registration at the door with its tote bags and the cartons behind them, the sign reading “Eingang Foyer Festsaal”, the buffet with sandwiches on red picks, the water bottles standing among the wines. A record of two working days is not made of highlights, and those are the frames a client needs later.

That masks are worn in several of the pictures dates the series. That is not a flaw — it is the difference between an archive and an illustration.