INTERVIEW
14th November 2023
12
Norwich Works: Co-Editor-in-Chief new castle exhibition with
Last month saw the opening of the latest exhibition at Norwich Castle, Norwich Works: The Industrial Photography of Walter and Rita Nurnberg . Curated by UEA academics Dr Nick Warr and Dr Simon Dell, it explores the Nurnberg’s photographs of three Norwich factories in the post-war period: Edwards and Holmes’ shoe factory, Boulton and Paul, who’s constructional engineering, joinery and wire netting departments were based at the Riverside, and Mackintosh-Caley’s chocolate factory at Chapelfield. For this issue, I spoke to Dr Warr, an art historian in AMA who works primarily on 20th century art history and curation, as well as being Director of the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), about how the exhibition came together and why the material it displays is still so relevant today. *** After Dr Warr had curated a photography exhibition at the castle in 2019, Jenny Caynes, a curator at The Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell, told him about a file of photographs of Norwich shoe workers they held. He agreed to give some advice on their conservation, but then Covid hit. He told me that him and Caynes “lived quite close to each other, so when we were allowed out and about I would pass her in the street where we’d walk the dogs. I’d pass her everyday and we’d have a little conversation about the photographs. She was saying ‘you’ve got to come and see them, we think they’re really special,’ and I’m thinking do I want to see photographs about shoemaking, it doesn’t sound very exciting. So when the museums opened up again in 2020 I was allowed to go and see them. I opened up these quite large albums, and the first one I opened
Image: Stitching shoe linings, 1948 (Norfolk Museums Service)
up was the portraits. [He realized] these don’t look like the photographs you see on Picture Norfolk or the EDP, these look like something from a 1930s Hollywood movie! I started thinking this is not an amateur photographer, this is clearly someone who is a really welltrained expert photographer. Really luckily, the back each photograph has Walter Nurnberg stamped on it, otherwise we wouldn’t know anything.” Dr Warr spoke to his former Sainsbury Centre colleague Dr Simon Dell about the photos, but despite having over 50 years of experience working on photography between them, nether had heard of Nurnberg. Exploring his archive in Bradford proved similarly unfruitful, as all they found were negatives with no names. There was only a breakthrough when Dr Warr decided to have a look in the Norfolk Record Office (which shares the Archive Centre at County Hall with the EAFA) on his lunch break, and “within boxes that are just labelled miscellaneous factory photographs,” he found hundreds of Nurnberg’s images, including those of the chocolate factory at Chapelfield and the Boulton and Paul steelworks. Despite expecting that there would be many examples of Nurnberg’s photos from factories he travelled to across the country, in reality Dr Warr explained that “the stuff in Norwich survives by chance – the Record Office got all the stuff from the companies when they shut down and the Musuem got them as a gift. I think that’s the reason why he’s fallen out of people’s memories a bit.” Dr Warr and Dr Dell gave a talk on their research, and it was then they were asked to create an exhibition of the photos. *** On the Nurnbergs’ story, Dr Warr explained that Walter was “born in Berlin to quite an affluent family of bankers. He wanted to be a musician but he wasn’t quite good enough so had to follow his dad into banking. One of the first jobs he had was to do the books for the Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin, which turned out to be a famous school if you wanted to be an industrial designer. There he met lots of people who had trained at the Bauhaus, a famous German art school,” and he enrolled in the Reimann’s new photography course, which taught him “all those things we think of as modern advertising photography, those slightly surreal or abstract photographs” that you see today in magazine adverts. When Hitler came to power, the Reimann School was shut down because of its Jewish leadership, so Nurnberg moved to London and took advertising photos
Image: Portrait of a worker, 1948 (Norfolk Museums Service) for lots of big companies, including cosmetics firms, drinks manufacturers and even Vogue. His style was markedly different to what had come before so “he was hot property!” When WWII came, as a German national he was put in an internment camp, and he joined the British Army in order to gain citizenship. It was in this period he met his wife Rita, who came from a German family but was born in England. “Her father ran the company that made the photographs to go in the magazines so Walter would have known them.” “After the war he decided he didn’t want to go back into advertising, he wanted to do something more meaningful. So he set about trying to think about new things to photograph… If you think about Britain after the war it was rebuilding, and he wanted to find a way to capture that and to show it from the workers’ point of view, whilst inventing a new way of photographing
it. From ‘47/’48 he started shopping for commissions, every time someone was building a new factory [typically in municipal centres like Norwich rather than central London] he would turn up and ask, ‘would you like some photographs of your new factory to commemorate it opening?’” All the photographs in the exhibition come from when the factories reopened, or resumed regular production post-war, so “he captures moments of renewal and going back to a bright new future.” He worked as a husband-andwife team with Rita, as “he would take the photographs and Rita would do all the printing and processing.” Once he had taken the photographs, he would then set up an exhibition of them, inviting the local factory owners in the hope they would ask for their own set of photos. On Nurnberg’s style of photography, Dr Warr suggested that “it is really weird, it’s extraordinary, it doesn’t look like anything else… Even though he’s
14th November 2023
13
concrete-online.co.uk/category/interview/ | @ConcreteUEA
Matthew Stothard discusses curator Dr Nick Warr
Image: Check weighing and closing cartons, 1958 (Norfolk Record Office) photographing in the 1940s and ‘50s, it still looks like it’s from the ‘30s and that silent cinema age.” On the subject matter, he explained that Nurnberg “ended up taking pictures of factories because no one else was. He could see the drama in it, he wrote a lot about how everyday life is worthy of artistic and creative endeavor not just pretty lakes and still lives, so he kind of invented a way of photographing everyday people.” *** When I asked Dr Warr about his standout photographs in the exhibition, he highlighted that “the portraits [of the Edwards and Holmes shoemakers, see left] are really special.” Although photos of Nurnberg’s exhibitions in local newspapers show that the portraits were their centrepieces, “they weren’t usually included when he gave over the big albums to the factory owner [because] he saw them as his own art practice.” This has made them a rare discovery, only included in the Edwards and Holmes set of photographs because they were intended as a gift to the retiring owner of the shoe factory. More broadly, when asked about the historical significance of the photographs, Dr Warr suggested that “the stories we hear about Norwich’s industries is always them shutting. It’s a case of ‘oh I remember there used to be chocolate factory here,’ people of a certain age are nostalgic about it, and [the conversation is around] all the big industries moving out. The [typical] story of Norwich and industry is one that’s very terminal and [focused on sites] closing down. What’s really interesting about these photographs is they tell the story of the development of modernist photography from a very European perspective, but they also show Norwich and industry at a moment when it was brand new again.
It feels very present and I think it’s an interesting way to think about heritage and history and how photography makes things more immediate. You see someone making a shoe or a chocolate in the 1940s and… they feel very fresh those photographs. You can identify with them and you feel them as present.” *** The exhibition also contains material from the EAFA (owned and managed by UEA), showing the realities of these factories beyond the Hollywood glamour of the Nurnbergs’ photographs. On the EAFA, Dr Warr pointed out that “the exhibition is a product of just how lucky we are in Norwich having these great resources, with the [Museums Service] having all the stuff about the shoes and the Record Office having [the material on the other factories featured]. The EAFA was the first regional film archive in the country, and was a real pioneer when it was started in the late 1970s by David Cleveland, who used to work at UEA, recognising that a lot of this film is just going to disappear, and that we should really be capturing it because it tells a story of the region unlike anything else. Through him and his contacts he started to build the archive which has been growing ever since and is one of the largest and most established film archives in the region. It has a really astonishing collection going back to the 1890s, so really early cinema. It has a lot of footage from early BBC and ITV Anglia, as well as lots of amateur footage, but it also made films to document these things.” “The footage of the Boulton and Paul wire factory [included in the exhibition] is quite rare because people didn’t usually film in factories. We have a film at the centre of the exhibition which is a silent drive around the city centre of Norwich in the 1950s, so you can still see all the bomb damage, made by the City Council to show how congested Norwich was by cars. It was before they widened the roads and got rid of historic streets. It’s a fantastic record of what Norwich looked like when the Nurnbergs were here making the photographs, and it was taken from a police car so there’s lots of hilarious moments of people crossing in front… and policemen shouting at them to get out of the way! Then the last film was made in 1995 by a film artist called Roger Hewins [who also taught media production at UEA]. He photographed the last month of the chocolate factory, and it’s really beautiful because rather than talking about the closing of the factory, the voiceover is people talking about their first day of work, which has a beautiful resonance with everything else because we’re talking about trying to get away from that idea of everything shutting down.”
Image: Setting saw teeth, 1947-8 (Norfolk Record Office) *** Finally, when asked what he hoped a UEA student visiting the exhibition would take away from it, Dr Warr said “what a wonderful institution they’re associated with, and the different type of work that’s going on at UEA. But I think a lot of people at UEA aren’t from Norwich or don’t know a lot about it, and don’t think that the
history of Norwich is for them. Hopefully what the photographs show is because they’re so stylised and artistic, it’s a different way of thinking about history and heritage and making, and actually there’s a lot of interest from students working in Broadcast Journalism or doing things like Media Practice and thinking about going into the creative industries.” They can consider “how photography and creative practice can shape not just what we think about the past but ways that we can think about the city and working around us. It’s an exhibition about creativity and work, and so if you’re looking to work in the creative industries it shows you a way of thinking about things differently.”
Norwich Works: The Industrial Photography of Walter & Rita Nurnberg is running at Norwich Castle until 14th April 2024. All the photos on these pages were created by Walter and Rita Nurnberg.
Image: Hand dipping marzipan fourrees, 1958 (Norfolk Record Office)