I confess my ignorance: I was not aware of E.O. Hoppé’s work as a photographer before admiring the atmospheric images he published in 1926 in a book entitled Picturesque Great Britain in the Sainsbury Centre’s exhibition on W.G. Sebald. Sebald would have known of him because, like Sebald himself, Hoppé was German. He arrived in London in 1900 to work for Deutsche Bank, was given a camera as a birthday present in 1903, married the sister of a friend, and left Deutsche Bank to set up a photographic studio in Baron’s Court in 1907. Incredibly well known in the 1920s as a fashionable portrait photographer, close friend of George Bernard Shaw, he moved to topographical work in the late 1920s, and subsequently sold his photographic archive to the Mansell Collection in 1954 where it was categorised by subject, not the name of the photographer, so his name disappeared nearly entirely from public view. It’s a very Sebaldian life story – loss, fame, talent, exile.

I hope I am not transgressing copyright by reproducing this picture of him:-

I stopped off in the Cathedral on my way to tea in Elm Hill in order to enjoy the full extent of the Nave – pure Romanesque up to the level of the Gothic vaults, which are thought to have been added by Bishop Lyhart after a fire in 1463:-

Most of the circular piers are plain, apart from two at the end marking where the altar stood, which are deeply incised:-

In one of the aisles the light is coloured by John McLean’s recently installed stained glass, one of which is in honour of Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the University’s former Vice Chancellor, and Moya Willson, her deputy:-

The chancel:-

Incised decoration in the north transept:-

And in one of the aisles:-

After lunch, I went to the second of the two Sebald exhibitions currently on in Norwich, this one, W.G. Sebald: Far Away – But From Where ? on a balcony of the Sainsbury Centre. It is much easier to interpret his own photographs here, as they are shown unframed in display cases together, rather charmingly, with the boxes from Boots where they were processed. He must have acquired a camera with a panoramic facility because he is very keen on panoramic images, as when he photographed Whitechapel Market and the Alderney Road Cemetery in April 1998 (he managed to get into the cemetery). He then got Michael Brandon-Jones to print details in black-and-white, distancing them from reality, and these images were then used, sometimes shrunk, to illustrate the books, as if they were found photographs (some of them were), not modern Boots snapshots.

This is a photograph he took in Mile End Cemetery in January 1999:-

Here it is in (I assume) Austerlitz:-

Michael Brandon-Jones owned a copy of E.O.Hoppé’s Picturesque Great Britain published in Berlin in 1926 and it is Hoppé’s aesthetic – grainy and atmospheric – which informs Sebald’s own approach to photography.

This is Hoppé’s photograph of a Steelworks in Sheffield, a detail of which was reproduced on p.108 of Austerlitz:-

There is then a screening of Tacita Dean’s elegiac film of Michael Hamburger’s Devon apples. She uses 16mm. film in the same way as Sebald uses his photographs, as a distancing technique. And the screen prints Tess Jaray made based on extracts from The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo.

I spent the morning in the exhibition Lines of Sight: W.G. Sebald’s East Anglia in the Norwich Castle Museum, which resurrects and helps one to analyse the complex process of transmogrification which occurred between Sebald’s own photographs of East Anglia, which are mostly quite dull, had they not been taken by him as visual records of the long walk he took in August 1992 and of the way they were then converted into more memorable, often cropped images by Michael Brandon-Jones, the photographer in the Art History Photographic Collection in UEA. He it was who turned the images into black-and-white in such a way that they could be used alongside postcards, book illustrations and archival images throughout the text of The Rings of Saturn, and which are so important to its atmosphere of historical and topographical suggestiveness.

These are the instructions which Sebald gave to Brandon-Jones on the printing of his photographs:-

And this is his list of the order in which the photographs were to appear:-

This is the picture of Sebald setting out for his walk which was used for the cover of the first German edition:-

One of the best and most unexpected things in the exhibition is a clip of a film made by Kenneth Griffith about Roger Casement which caused Sebald to fall asleep in his green velvet armchair when it was first broadcast on 28th. October 1992. It’s in a style of suggestive and poetic documentary film making which is nowadays unimaginable, but not surprising that Sebald admired it.

In walking past Jacob Burckhardt’s house on the St. Alban-Vorstadt where he lived during his time as a Professor at the University, originally from 1848 to 1853 and later from 1858 to his retirement in 1893 (he died four years later), I am forced to reflect on how much the discipline of art history owes not to Germany – although Burckhardt was trained as an art historian under Ranke and Kugler in Berlin – but to the cast of mind of this liberal, sceptical Calvinist, brought up as a member of a prominent Basel family, the son of a minister at the Cathedral. Burkhardt first taught architectural history in Bonn, then published Der Cicerone in 1855. There is a picture of him walking past the Cathedral with a large portfolio of drawings under his arm, on his way to the University to teach his students of the virtues of humanism.

The sun came out yesterday afternoon on the streets of the Altstadt round the Minster and down towards the river where Jacob Burkhardt lived and wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:-

I have been to the William Kentridge exhibition at the Kunstmuseum twice today: once because I made the mistake of thinking that it could be visited casually; a second time because I found its scale and content overwhelming, so full of the politics of content, drawing, music, tough imagery, it needs time to ingest. I know everyone else already knows this.

Upstairs is a display devoted, very appropriately, to Erasmus (he’s buried in the Cathedral):-

The top floor has a performance, More Sweetly Play the Dance, which is overwhelming.

The ferry took me to the Minster: with carving in red sandstone.

The church was reconstructed after the previous Romanesque church had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1356. Its architect was Johnannes von Gmünd, also responsible for Freiburg Minster, the towers being added in the fifteenth century, more gothic:-

Beautiful carving in the north portal:-

In the west door:-

And a high gothic – or is it flamboyant gothic ? – pulpit:-

It was hard to resist the childish pleasure of crossing the Rhine on one of the river boats which plies its way back and forth from below the Cathedral to the opposite bank – surprisingly fast, as it turns out, in spite of being unmotorised, relying only on the strength of the current:-

By dint of staying in the University district, I have got to know a bit of Basel which I didn’t know before.

The Spalenvorstadt, full of old shops and well preserved façades, which leads down into the old town:-

Back up from the Marketplace:-

Past the old Kunstgewerbemuseum:-

There are good details:-

The Petersplatz, alongside the botanical garden, is, not surprisingly, very green:-

With more good details on the houses:-