Gerd Mingram

Gerd Mingram (* 1910 in Hamburg ; † 2001 in Hemmoor ), known as Germin , was a German photographer and picture reporter.

Life

In 1928 he co-founded the Communist Youth in Hamburg-Winterhude with Helmuth Lasch . With photography Mingram began after his typesetter teaching when he and a friend the age of 20 on the roll was in Scandinavia. Mingram was self-taught. From 1933 he worked as a photographer. In the Third Reich , official authorities refused to give Germin, who was sympathetic to the communist youth, an editor's card, which was essential for journalistic work. Germin worked anyway. During the war he was a soldier on the Eastern Front. There he hid his Leica in his haversack in order to secretly record the atrocities and horrors of the war. After the war, under the pseudonym Germin , he continued to take photographs for Hamburg newspapers, the trade union press and magazines such as the Stern , as a theater photographer for stages such as the Hamburg Schauspielhaus and the Thalia Theater . He also worked as a photo journalist for the house newspapers of the gas and water works. In 1975 he stopped working as a photographer and moved to Hemmoor.

plant

A total of over a hundred thousand black and white photos of him have survived. He mainly documented everyday scenes in Northern Germany, especially topics from the world of work. In addition, he also portrayed greats from film, theater and politics. In 1961 he took photos for a union newspaper in the Hamburg " Top Ten Club " and happened to take early photos of the then unknown Beatles . He sold some of the photos to Paul McCartney for £ 30,000 in the mid-1970s . A large part of his estate is now in the State Media Center in Hamburg and in the Museum of Labor , which bought more than 80,000 pictures from him. His recordings have been used for several books. He bequeathed his private photo archive with around 40,000 photos that are carefully labeled to his friend and colleague Günter Zint . On behalf of Jan Philipp Reemtsma's Institute for Social Research , all photos were digitized and can be viewed at www.panfoto.de. Since 2015 his most important photos can also be seen in the Deutsche Fotothek (www.deutschefotothek.de)

Own publications

• On the roller in Scandinavia. Hamburg 1930
• Improvised new beginning: Hamburg 1943-1953. Hamburg 1989

Publications about Gerd Mingram

• Gernot Krankenhagen (Ed.): Photo Germin: Life and work of a photo journalist. , Hamburg 1994

Web links

• Gerd Mingram in the Deutsche Fotothek