Tafel-Akademie – Maßnahmen gegen Armut
Photo coverage for the Tafel Akademie. Event photography: Frankfurt am Main. Not fieldwork but work at the table: participants writing on moderation cards…
Coverage of a Tafel-Akademie conference on poverty, held at the Evangelische Akademie in Frankfurt. Not fieldwork but work at the table: participants writing on moderation cards, one of them reading "Schufa entry", someone facilitating at the pinboard, groups at white tables in the hall under its pitched roof, the chair speaking from the lectern. Picturing poverty without putting affected people on display means exactly this: showing the people working on it.
The hall is a converted attic: white trusses forming triangles across the frame, a matt black wall behind them, narrow windows set into the roof slope on both sides, light tubes overhead. Photographically that is a hard combination — the roof windows are many times brighter than the black wall, and both are in the same frame. Exposure goes on the faces at the table; the windows blowing out is the price, and it is the right one to pay.
No flash. A working conference is a conversation, and a flash interrupts it every single time — after the third one nobody is sitting the way they were sitting before. So fast glass, available light, and distance: the camera stays at conversation height and does not get in between.
The hardest decision is what may be shown. “Schufa-Eintrag” — a credit-record entry — written in marker pen on a blue moderation card is the frame that names the subject most plainly, and it shows a hand, a pen and a card and nothing else. The whole set works that way: the cards on the table, the pinboard, the group under the roof, the speaker at the Evangelische Akademie lectern, photographed past the shoulder of someone listening so that she stands in a room with an audience rather than alone in the frame. Illustrating poverty here means showing the work being done about it and putting nobody on display.
- Purpose
- Charity
- Place
- Frankfurt am Main
