My photographs of the Berlin Wall, taken in 1989, are amongst the most regularly viewed in my Flickr photostream. Understandable in the lead up to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on 9 November this year.

Some of them are mine and a few are a fellow traveller’s, collected by me at the time of my visit (and later) in January 1989. Walking some of the perimeter of the Wall, looking at that stark sign, ‘Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin’, was sobering and I wanted to remember it from all angles.

I wrote about it in my travel diary. All year I’ve been meaning to go back and revisit those memories, which I was sure would be fresh, vivid, insightful – but that is not quite the case. I am as happy for my twenty year’s younger self to stay buried between those pages as Harry Potter would have been for the owner of Tom Riddle’s diary to do the same. My observations are indeed very much of the moment and seem, to me now, shallow – real, true, but shallow. Perhaps that was the value of committing them to paper – instant thoughts without the value of reflection, time bound in context (fleeting, youthful, passing through).

The strongest memory wasn’t committed to paper. My friend and I spent a day in East Berlin, passing through Checkpoint Charlie first thing in the morning, converting the requisite amount of Deutsch Marks into the East German currency. We went to one of the museums, walked around and generally marvelled at the difference a wall can make, wondered what we could buy with the money the East Germans so desperately wanted us to spend. The answer to that was books – my friend and I were both students of German at Melbourne University.

We found a book shop. There was a queue to get in – the number inside at any one time was strictly regulated. We stood in the queue with the locals and I, in English, unquietly, said to my friend how ridiculous I found it. The East German man in front turned to me solemnly, “We think so too”.

It was humbling. That’s what I remember.

Berlin Wall on Flickr

I uploaded my scanned images of the Berlin Wall to Flickr more than three years ago. My tags included “Berlin Wall”, Berlin, “Berliner Mauer”, mauer, “1988-89 trip”, Germany, scanned, and have ensured that my images are found, shared and appreciated.

Flickr is the perfect vehicle for resurrecting and sharing history from the depths of visual memory and old boxes of slides and photographs. The Flickrverse is currently being encouraged to share memories (via text and images) in the group Experience History: Berlin 1961-1989. See also Das geteilte Berlin 1945-1990.

Several of my Berlin Wall images have been added to galleries curated by other Flickr users, a new concept in Flickr which I haven’t yet explored, but should: Berlin Wall in Color, The Berlin Wall / Die Berliner Mauer, and the intriguing Smoke Screens & Mirrors.

Images, history and invention – that’s the title of an event coming up on Monday 14 July at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and I have been invited to speak at it in my capacity as a Flickr photographer, archivist and contributor to Picture Australia.

“Join image makers and picture curators in conversation on their passion for image collections. View a DVD of works produced by creative Australians and from the collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the country. Find out about the collective image network that makes up Picture Australia and the opportunities for you to contribute.”

6.30 pm, Monday 14 July 2008
National Library of Australia
Screening: LG1 Theatre
Parkes Place, Canberra

Free entry
Bookings essential: 02 6262 1271

The event is part of the Vivid National Photography Festival. Once I’ve given the talk I hope to reflect on things in writing here (reader, live in hope).

I say a bit, because in some areas I’m quite good. I have a twelve year email archive that is still accessible and in regular use, and I migrated my Masters thesis (early 1990s) from an early word processing format on 5¼ inch discs. A copy is sitting on my laptop as I write.

But I last backed up contents of said laptop in February!

And worse, I have more than two years of certain aspects of my life invested in Flickr, and have yet to investigate ways of extracting all that data into a format I control and will be able to access in twenty years time.

Some while back I pondered the problem of archiving text messages. My solution, ultimately, was to photograph the particular messages of value to me. Where are those photos now? On Flickr and on my laptop…

Greater minds than mine Gunga Din have been thinking about these issues, and I leave you with this reference for now:

Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Papers, Bodleian Library, 2007. (That’s the title of the web version. The hard copy version is Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Archives, which, I think, is more meaningful.)