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Eric Fichtl
<p>A man thinks while drinking pulque, a traditional Mesoamerican indigenous drink made from the maguey plant.</p>

Thanks for visiting. This website features my photography, writing, and a bit about me.

PHOTOS

Here is a random sample of my photos. Visit my galleries for many more.


<p>Cologne's Ebertplatz shows its 1970s urban design, provoking the usual love-hate response. While the dark corners of its pedestrian underpasses have raised concerns about crime and safety, these recesses also host art galleries and restaurants (like this Nigerian place).</p>
<p>A giraffe and a zebra share a moment.</p>
<p>An impressive amount of sass from two minimalist mannequins.</p>
<p>Perquín, a town in the Morazán department of El Salvador, was a key stronghold of the FMLN guerrillas during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. Today it hosts a museum dedicated to their revolutionary efforts.</p>
<p>From the perspective of the Town Hall's tower, Gdansk's historic centre almost appears to be made up of toy houses.<br /></p>
<p>Macao has some of the highest population density figures in the world. Some sections of the geographically constrained city are home to more than 20,000 people per square kilometre. </p>
<p>Storm clouds arrive at la Santísima Trinidad de Paraná, one of the Jesuit <em>reducciónes</em> (missionary colonies) built in this region during the 17th and 18th Centuries. They fell into ruin when the Jesuits were expelled by Spain in 1767. </p>
<p>With the camera positioned just so, this neoclassical cupola appears to sit proportionally atop a modernist base in the heart of Potsdam. It kind of works. <br /></p> <p>They are, though, two separate buildings. The dome belongs to the St. Nicholas Church, which dates from the mid 19th Century when Potsdam was part of the Kingdom of Prussia. In the foreground is the facade of the Institut für Lehrerbildung 'Rosa Luxemburg', a teacher training academy built in the 1970s when Potsdam was part of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).</p> <p>This view no longer exists. <br /></p> <p>A 2010 decision by Potsdam city officials ordered the dismantling of the Institut, which duly occurred in 2017. It is to be replaced by a new structure that will recreate the facade of Prussian palace while masking a contemporary interior – the rationale being to create an architecturally harmonious setting on a key central square. <br /></p> <p>Sound familiar? Berlin also recently opted to remove the DDR-era modernist Palast der Republik (itself built on the site of a Prussian palace the East German government had demolished for its symbolic associations with the imperial past) and erect a simulacrum Prussian palace (the Humboldt Forum project). </p> <p>These decisions – which evoke one history while erasing another – are a continuation of Germany's highly contested reckoning with its past, as Brian Ladd explores in his excellent book, <em>Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape</em>. For some, the frequent consensus for neoclassical lines among politicians and urban planners is a canny dodge reflecting a certain conservatism – it seeks to escape the extremes of the 20th Century (including their manifestations in architecture) by locating historically safe ground in the perceived unity of the imperial Germany of the Kaisers. But that preference is a hagiographic illusion (the clue is in the word 'imperial'), and opts for an allegorical amnesia over a challenging architectural response to the complexity of the German experience. <br /></p> <p>There is something incredibly uninspired (not to say regressive) about rebuilding long-gone imperial palaces on sites where the ground is both hallowed and historically contested. And as beautiful as neoclassical facades may be (and Berlin and Potsdam have plenty of them to show off), as 21st Century new-builds they are dated symbols that fail equally at capturing nuanced historic legacy and at presenting the forward-looking aspects of contemporary German society. </p>
TEXTS

A lot of what I write professionally carries no byline. Here are some of the works I have put my name to.

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Let Them Eat Cake… The End of the Tortilla Subsidy in Mexico

The cost of that most Mexican of basic foodstuffs jumped by 25% as the government repealed price control legislation.
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Uribe Administration Impeding Foreign Press

The new president moves to limit any potentially damaging reports appearing in the foreign press.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Multilateral Lending in the 1990s

A briefing on key terminology and institutions.