Cecil FS Newman

Cecil FS Newman (born August 2, 1914 in Lisburn , † December 19, 1984 in Belfast ) was a Northern Irish engineer, town planner, landscaper and photographer .

Life

Cecil FS Newman, son of a police officer, grew up in the suburbs of Belfast . After graduating from the Royal Belfast Academical Institution , he worked in the Belfast City Council and began evening engineering studies at Queen's University Belfast . In 1938 he began officer training at the Officer's Training Corps. 1939-1946 he was with the Royal Engineers . Newman was deployed in Belfast, Gibraltar and, for a short time, at Moyland Castle near Wesel.

From July 1945 to August 1946 he was stationed in Berlin and worked in the Public Works and Utilities department of the British military government. As a building expert, he was sent to the International Committee for Building and Housing, which dealt in particular with the development of prefabricated assembly houses and supported the work of the planning collective headed by City Planning Councilor Hans Scharoun . The results of the work were presented in 1946 in the exhibition "Berlin plans - First Report" in the White Hall of the Berlin City Palace. In August 1946, Newman returned to Belfast with the rank of major. He initially worked again in the Belfast City Council and, after completing an external course, received full membership in the Royal Town Planning Institute . From 1956 he worked for the Northern Irish Ministry of Development. In the early 1960s, he was involved as a city planner on the regional plan for Belfast, the Metthew Plan. In the 1970s he emerged as the author of the area plans for the Morne Mountains and the Newry Area, into which he incorporated his own photographic work. Newman received the Order of the British Empire in 1972 and was honored in 1984 by the Royal Town Planning Institute Northern Ireland for his outstanding services; For years he was a leading member of the Ulster Society for the Protection of the Countryside , which erected a memorial stone for him in 1987: »Cecil Newman. Friend of Morne. «.

photography

Newman has been taking photographs since 1935, as evidenced by photos from the hiking and climbing trips of his scout group. As early as 1943 he exhibited large-format portraits, landscape and architecture photographs in Gibraltar. About 1400 black and white negatives and 55 color slides have survived from his time in Berlin in 1945 and 1946. The pictures were taken with a Kodak Retinette and a Leica IIIa . The family donated this collection to the Stadtmuseum Berlin in 2011 . Throughout his life he incorporated his own photographic practice into his work as city and landscape plans. His landscape photographs are now in the collections of the Down County Museum and the National Museum Northern Ireland. The rest of his photographic work, including many pictures from Belfast, is kept by his family. In 1947 Cecil Newman was accepted into the Royal Photographic Society , and the first exhibition of his photographic work took place in 1984 at the Housing Advice Center Belfast: "Reflections of CFS Newman - a Planner and his Camera". An exhibition of his landscape photographs was posthumously held in 2013 at the Down County Museum . In 2015, a presentation of his Berlin photo works followed in the Märkisches Museum of the Stadtmuseum Berlin:

“Many of the photographs reveal the factual view of the urban planner and engineer, who was less interested in composition than in documenting his work, for example when Newman shows building materials that were delivered for reconstruction. In other recordings, however, the gaze of the ambitious amateur with artistic interest also manifests itself. Accordingly, Newman gave titles that were factually descriptive and sometimes poetic. He called a picture that shows destroyed Soviet and German tanks at a freight yard "The last Parade". A picture with the title “Homecoming to Berlin” has the potential to become an iconic building block in the collective visual memory of the Second World War: It shows a one-legged soldier, a small figure on crutches, alone between mighty ruins. The homecomer stands for the fate of many who, after the end of the Second World War, could not exactly count on the sympathy of the Allies. But Newman, whose hometown Belfast was badly damaged in German air raids, portrayed the Berliners with empathy and sympathy. It shows friendly smiling faces illuminated by the sun, such as the “Forest School Kids. Berlin Girls ”, a color photograph of several girls in summer dresses holding each other in their arms, their heads framed by clouds of cotton wool. Such recordings testify to the optimism that Newman and his colleagues probably needed to believe in the reconstruction of the city. "

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literature

• Logan, Karen, and M. Lesley Simpson: Two men of Morne. Photographs by Pat Hudson and Cecil Newman (Yearbook of Down County Museum). County Down 2013, ISBN 978-0-9567278-8-6
• Stadtmuseum Berlin Foundation (publisher) Berlin 1945/46. Photographs by Cecil FS Newman. (with an introduction by Ines Hahn). Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-89479-948-9

Web links

• Literature by and about Cecil FS Newman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Down County Museum website
• Presentation of the exhibition on the website of the Stadtmuseum Berlin
• Article "Everyday life in the reconstructive desert" by Wolf Lautenschläger in the TAZ
• Article "Chronicler of Desolation" on Welt.de
• Article about the exhibition in the Tagesspiegel
• Interactive time travel through Berlin with photos by Cecil Newman and Jochen Wermann
• Article "The wounds of a big city" on Spiegel Online
• Photo gallery on Bauwelt.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Down County Museum website . As of September 22, 2015.
2. ^ Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (ed.) Berlin 1945/46. Photographs by Cecil FS Newman. (with an introduction by Ines Hahn). Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2015, p. 6.
3. ↑ The Berlin tenement house. Vol. 1. 1740-1862. Prestel, Munich 1980, pp. 422-438.
4. ^ Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (ed.) Berlin 1945/46. Photographs by Cecil FS Newman. (with an introduction by Ines Hahn). Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2015, p. 10.
5. ↑ Sabine Weier in: Photonews 9/2015 ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.