INTERVIEW
14th November 2023
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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