Mira Eckhardt at Linien-Werkstatt

The session began without a brief. I had walked in earlier that morning to scout the room and Konstantinos waved me through without looking up from his own station. Mira was on her own at the back bench. We spoke for ten minutes. I asked if I could come back after lunch and shoot her at work between walk-ins. She said yes if I stayed out of her line of sight when she was inking. That became the rule of the afternoon.

The first frame is what I came for. She is fully inside the line — gloved right hand on the machine, customer arm on the black leather rest, the green-soap mason-jar and the paper-towel arranged exactly as Konstantinos taught her. The Greek-script Cavafy fragment on her own right forearm is the Werk-anchor — it was Konstantinos who tattooed it on her in her first month as an apprentice. Linien-Werkstatt means line-workshop; everything in the room is a line, including the small framed Cavafy quotes Konstantinos pins on the wall above each station.

The second frame is what happened when the customer asked for a water-break. She put the machine down on her right thigh and looked up directly into the camera. The pinboard of fine-line-flash behind her is her own work from the first nine months of apprenticeship plus three sheets from Konstantinos as teaching-references. The cropped-mullet is self-cut between Saturday shifts; she trades the trim with the fabric-stand-daughter on the Maybachufer most weeks, which is how I learned the cohort runs across two work-lines.

The making-of frame is from the moment between her cleaning the stencil-trace and starting the first line. Konstantinos is two meters behind her, fully inside his own working-attention with his own customer. The Mamiya 7-II on the tripod is mine — I shot the editorial on Portra 400 over an hour-and-fifteen-minutes, ninety frames, fourteen approved. The discipline I had to keep was: do not break Mira's working-attention. I shot only when she was either fully inside the line or fully outside it. The frames in between, where the working-attention is breaking or reassembling, I let pass.

What this editorial argues — and what 032c can use it for — is that the Reuter-Quartier Junior-Werk-Linie carries an actual lineage. Athens-tattoo-workshop into a Berlin-Neukölln back-room, second-year apprentice working under a Meister whose hand-genealogy goes back to Stathis Doulgeridis in Piraeus 1978. The cropped-mullet is the surface. The Cavafy on the wall is the substance.

— Théo