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Storyable Images: Manfred Beier’s Private-to-Public Archive

In just the last few years, there seems a new cultural phenomenon with specific ties to the rise of vernacular photography in the twentieth century: the extensive, private archive of a hobbyist photographer is found posthumously and assumes a public role, tickling popular imagination. Businessman Charles W. Cushman’s three decades of early color negatives and prints taken for personal hobby were bequeathed to a public collection upon his death. Nondescript nanny Vivian Maier dynamically documented four decades of life in Chicago, along with her travels; images that were uncovered in storage later. To add to these bookmarks in vernacular photography is the impressive trove found by the sons of East German school teacher Manfred Beier, who, in just shy of 60 years amassed over 60,000 exposures. While Beier was alive, images remained negatives concealed in his basement. The sheer size of Beier’s photographic archive is enough to have any historian metaphorically weak at the knees. 50,000 small format negatives, 9,000 small format slides, 3500 medium format negatives, 400 standard 8 and Super 8 films, and 38 notebooks meticulously document the mechanical and contextual details of each and every image (Fig. 1). It is all the more remarkable within the historical moment of their making. Dating between 1944 and 2002, these visual documents span Nazi Germany, postwar reconstruction, the entirety of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) existence, and the first decade of national reunification. And, a delicate mastery of composition, color and content, the photographs are stunning. There is a social documentary mode to many of the scenes he framed. He takes us from domestic spaces, school classrooms and sanctioned travels around the Soviet Bloc to community celebrations, workplaces, and postwar reconstruction sites (Figs. 2 and 3). His images are also appealing for their aesthetics: a strikingly intimate portrait of men shaving; a gracefully balanced image of his young students on a field trip; a shot of the Photography & Culture