Kaffeehaus Goldene Waage – Frankfurt
Interior and patisserie photography in Frankfurt's old town. The Goldene Waage coffee house in Frankfurt's Neue Altstadt. The room is a reconstruction and an…
The Goldene Waage coffee house in Frankfurt's Neue Altstadt. The room is a reconstruction and an original all the same: red walls, leaded windows in round arches, turned black columns, a checkerboard floor, a coffered ceiling above the gallery, and the wall of hundreds of framed pressed plants that runs through the whole building. Alongside it the patisserie on the house's own china — strawberry tartlets, Frankfurter Kranz, slices under chocolate glaze — and the marble fountain in its niche.
Photographed in available light, because that warm light is half the building. A light on a stand would turn the walls into a clean red and remove exactly what makes the room: that it is dark in places, that the leaded windows throw patterns across the floor, and that the gilding on the capitals only shines where something reaches it.
The red is the technical trap of the whole job. A large red wall is the first thing to clip in saturation, and once it does it loses its drawing — textured plaster becomes a glowing surface with no edges. So the exposure runs tighter than the room feels, and the brightness is brought back out of the shadows afterwards.
The frame from the gallery is the most important one. From below the coffee house is a handsome dining room; from above you see how tall it is, how the checkerboard orders the floor, and that the windows run through two stories. A building whose argument is its height has to be photographed from above.
And the tartlets stand where they stand anyway: on the house's china, in the display case, on a table by the window. Patisserie on a neutral studio ground would be interchangeable. In front of leaded glass and a red wall, even the smallest strawberry tartlet is instantly attached to this one place.
- Place
- Frankfurt Old Town
