Kees' photos with the keyword: icking nr. 8

Under our roof...

Again: The kind of detail Darwin Bell likes to shoot. I don’t know if he’d like it as much if it was a detail of his own house, but I do.

This is the scan of a little treasure we got just yesterday: the oldest extant picture of our house. It must have been taken shortly after the house had been built, at the end of the 19th C. It’s a rarity for us, but probably also for Icking’s pictorial history: I doubt if many photos older than this have been preserved. I was happy to see several of my earlier conjectures confirmed: the beautiful door which now adorns the back of the house actually belongs to the front, and there had been painted ornaments over the windows (traces of which I believed to have discovered on the second oldest photo ). By far the biggest surprise for us was the entrance area: they are hard to see, but there are three steps leading straight to the front door, whereas all other photos we have show the situation as it is now: a roofed portal with steps on each side.

The view from my window isn’t always as pretty as this: in the central background is Icking’s collecting point for recyclable material... However, heavy weather makes poetry out of prosaic subjects.

The back door of our house is much nicer than the front door. It really hurts that it’s the doctor’s...

This one is too dark, and it lacks detail in the dark parts. But I like it: the sky is beautiful, and I wouldn’t like the details I would have seen... I must have a polaroid filter some day (B+W 67mm Käsemann –always go for the best)...

Every now and then someone comes and tries to sell you a photo he took from high up above. As usual, the scan wasn’t very good, so I processed it through PhotoArtist Express. It now definitely has become a work of art. In the background is a hotel called “Alpenblick”, built in the fifties. It saved our lives during the period we had a house with no kitchen. Perhaps we prolonged its life, too: we have a kitchen, now, and the hotel has closed down.

I hope this picture will, at least partially, satisfy Oldwoodchuck’s wish for a more recent picture of our house. I don’t know who those people standing in our garden are... Are they stealing apples? If I had shot this picture myself I would have called the police first! Scan of a picture taken by my brother.

Our house in the 50ies: the big changes were yet to come... However, the road had been broadened and the long stairs leading to it had to make a corner. In the 60ies the concrete wall on the left was extended to the right: the house kept its address but lost its entrance on this side. This makes us hard to find; deliveries are often guided by phone calls...

So sah unser Haus vor siebzig, achtzig Jahren aus; seitdem hat es sich sehr gewandelt –nicht immer zum Besseren... This is what our house looked like seventy, eighty years ago; it has changed a lot since then -not always for the better...