Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

Finally, I found a little time to post some of my San Francisco photographs. Having been there for only a few days, I don’t know if they do justice to the city’s incredible character and diversity, but I like some of them quite a lot.

I reached San Francisco on the night of Wednesday, March 4, 2009. Before my arrival, I booked a night in the Hostel in Fort Mason. It turned out to be one of the most amazing places. The next morning, I had a few hours to spare before the Fulbright Enrichment Seminar started, so I strolled down the beach along Marina Boulevard to the Golden Gate Bridge. John, a guy that I met in the hostel, joined me, and we had a hell of a time.

The old footbridge is just a few hundred yards away from the Bridge and there are dozens of starfish on its pillars. I’ve never seen so many at a time.

On the bridge head is an observation deck with telescopes, and it’s amazing how many people feed them with their hard-earned money when they could just walk on the bridge and see it “live”.

Just below the Bridge, at Fort Point, dozens of surfers wait for their wave in the ice cold water.

We later saw that woman riding her bike back down the hill to Marine Drive. Her skirt was ballooning in the fair wind like a brake parachute…

That fence just next to Redwood Highway secures the steep flank that drops from the bike path down to the sea.

The seminar was amazing. I met a lot of incredible people from all over the world, and we had a ton of fun. There was a lot of sitting around and listening to presentations, but it was pretty interesting. The guy in the picture is Damiano from Italy. He studies Journalism in New York. After the seminar was finished, we hung around in San Francisco for another day and explored China Town together with some other really amazing people.

Khurshid is a Fulbrighter from Bangladesh. Meeting him and the other Bangladeshis at the seminar kind of made me feel home sick… Shoshur bari zindabad!!!

I had a lot of fun with the hills in San Francisco…

Really. A lot of fun.

I didn’t get to ride the famous cable cars, but I rode the F Line. I just love the cars. They remind me of the Tram in Munich. Talking about home sickness…

The Hornblower Yacht in front of the Bay Bridge at Pier 3. On the last night of the seminar, Fulbright sponsored a boat cruise with dinner on the Bay. What an experience…

The skyline at night from the Bay. I know, it really is a cheesy shot, but I just couldn’t resist…

And yes, we DID have a party…

It was really a magical moment when the yacht turned around under the Bridge. Somehow, I felt like in a movie from the 1930s.

Friendships were made, birthdays were celebrated, plans were concocted, and then we had to get off the beautiful Hornblower Yacht and out into the San Francisco night…

The next day, Ali from Turkey, Evisa from Latvia, Damiano, John (the guy I met in the hostel) and I strolled through China Town had lunch outside on the deck of a nice little restaurant. We paid $15.95 each for a five-course menu and got more food than we could have ever dreamed of. The taste was ok, but not really different from the standard Chinese food in the standard Chinese restaurant. Maybe we should have invested a little more and gone for authentic Chinese, but we were hungry and broke…

Photograph by John Bowman

And no, Damiano is not flashing his middle finger in the photo above. But he sure plays his beer bottle like a trumpet…

In some ways, China Town reminded me of Italy. The laundry hanging from the balconies, that is something you might as well see in some back alley in Florence or Verona.

And here it is: the world famous Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in Ross Alley!!! Here’s an excerpt from their web site:

“A tiny old-world factory situated in Chinatown has produced thousands of Chinese Fortune Cookies a day since 1962. In the dim light, watching three women deftly turn dough into fortune cookies you could be forgiven for thinking you had traveled back in time.”

Who wouldn’t agree?

Some snap shots…

This one’s on Broadway and Columbus. I don’t think it needs any explanation. I just love that cutline at the bottom…

After lunch, Evisa’s friend Magda, another Fulbrighter from Slovakia, joined us and while Damiano stayed back in China Town, we went up to Twin Peaks to enjoy the view over the city. That is, those of us with short hair enjoyed the view…

Finally Magda and Evisa found a way to enjoy it, too…

The moon lit our way back down from Twin Peaks…

…to the parking lot, where a group of Buddhist monks also fell for the beauty of the scenery.

Before having our last supper (in San Francisco) in an awesome Thai restaurant, we went to Dolores Park to have a last look at the skyline by night…

So Anne and I went to the car park on Hitt Street last night to do our Multiple Flash assignment. After running into an endless series of problems, we finally managed a few good exposures. This is my select:

Charlie Hill (right) and Chris Williams (middle) fight for the ball while Nick Jacob secures the sideline during a bicycle polo game at the car park on Hitt Street on the evening of December 2nd, 2008.

Kingsley’s Crossing is the story of a young Cameroonian who decides to leave behind his country and escape to Europe in order to support his family back home. French photojournalist Olivier Jobard accompanies him during the whole journey, from the moment Kingsley decides to leave home, throughout the crazy journey across the African continent, the life-threatening boat ride across the Atlantic Ocean until he reaches Europe and starts his new life. It is a compelling story about despair, determination, hopes and dreams, but also about the shattering of these hopes and dreams. MediaStorm has published a multimedia version of this photo story, produced by Brian Storm and Eric Maierson, which can be seen here.

According to Brian Storm, Olivier Jobard originally did not plan to edit this story as a multimedia show, which is why there is no on-site audio. However, I believe that this adds to the power of the whole outcome, because he could (and did) concentrate fully on his photography.

Throughout the story, Jobard is extremely close to his subjects. He is not an observer anymore, but he becomes a participant in this perilous journey. He is with them during the whole trip, and neither sandstorms nor fear of robbers nor the dreadful, godforsaken nutshell the group tries to cross the Atlantic in can put him off joining them. He crosses the desert on the back of a truck, along with 35 other people. He sleeps with them under thorn bushes. He is with them when their boat capsizes at night and two people die in the waves, and he is with them when the boat is about to sink in the middle of the ocean and they are rescued literally in the last moment by the Spanish Coast Guard. Thus he is able to deliver photography that is unprecedentedly close to the human drama refugees go through every day. He captures not only the events that are happening in front of his lens. He captures the fear and the despair, the determination and the bravery of the people who are with him.

In this story, Jobard uses only available light and shoots wide-angle, probably even using only one lens. It seems that he tried to keep his gear as limited as possible, which makes sense on a journey as chaotic as this one. The use of available light results in some blurred pictures, especially those of the boat ride at night. These pictures are incredibly powerful and probably convey the desperate atmosphere a lot better than sharp pictures would. They carry a strong reminiscence of Robert Capa’s D-Day images.

Upon presenting the pictures to Brian Storm, president of MediaStorm, Storm recommended Jobard in absence of on-site audio to go and interview Kingsley, confronting him with the photographs of the journey. In this interview, Kingsley sits in front of a white background and recapitulates his whole story in vivid details. This interview is the basis for the film’s audio track. Together, Kingsley and Jobard lead us through the story, step by step, the one in words, the other in pictures. The combination of Kingsley’s voice and those incredible pictures brings the story to vivid life and endows it with an amazing emotional as well as informative power. Along with the few and very carefully used video sequences where you can actually see Kingsley talking, the film brings the viewer extremely close to the narrator.
In addition to the interview, African percussion music underlies large parts of the film and changes its rhythm and time according to the rhythm of the narration, thus emphasizing the very successful interplay of moments of tension and moments of quietness that make a story absorbing.

Jody Sugrue and Vincent Diga contributed elaborately animated graphics to the project. On these recurring maps of Africa, the viewer can follow Kingsley on his insane odyssey across the continent. His disheartening seesaw – traveling across the desert towards the European continent, turning around and moving away from it, once more turning around, being already in viewing distance of the Spanish coast only to travel south again – could probably not be illustrated in a better way.

The last scene of the film is the end of the interview, where Jobard asks Kingsley if he wants to say anything else. Kingsley contemplates for an instant and then says no. The camera stays on him, and he is obviously very agitated. He buries his face in his hands, then silently stands up and leaves the frame. This unusual but powerful ending reflects the feeling that the viewer is left behind with after seeing this incredible story: speechlessness.

All in all, it can be said that Kingsley’s Crossing is an outstanding example of the successful combination of different media. It absorbs the viewer until the very end and leaves a permanent impression. It is concerned journalistic work at its highest level, triggering every kind of reaction from people of all social backgrounds – refugees as well as visual anthropologists – as can be seen in the comments on this film. It creates awareness and thus has the power to contribute substantially to a change of the refugees’ situation. It is – like most of the other films on MediaStorm – a groundbreaking piece of work that demonstrates us where photojournalism is bound to go in future.

Last night, I was at Harpo’s with a bunch of friends, and we popped into the weekly Trivia contest. So I tried the popping flash thing a little bit. This is my select:

22-year old Stasia Bevard, a senior arts student at the University of Missouri in Columbia works part-time as a waitress at Harpo’s on 10th Street. Her working there was no accident. “I used to come here a lot, [so] I decided I might as well work here,” she says.