Saxony
That is the reason Leipzig is in this catalogue and not a larger city. The Spinnerei in the west is twenty brick halls across ten hectares, now studios and galleries, and it is open during the day. For anything that needs rough space — couple sessions with an edge, boudoir, band photographs, personal branding for people who will not stand in front of a white wall — that is a resource you normally only get with a filming permit. Alongside that, Leipzig is a water city, which almost nobody expects. The Karl-Heine-Kanal and the Weiße Elster run through the west with bridges, banks and canoes on them in summer; the floodplain forest reaches almost into the centre and is the largest urban riparian woodland in central Europe. And the city has stayed cheap and young, which in practice means school-leavers’ and student work has a volume a city this size would not otherwise carry — and the centre is photographable on a Saturday.
April and May are the best time in the floodplain forest: wild garlic, new leaves, and no closed canopy yet to shade everything out. Summer belongs to the canal and the lakes south of the city. October turns the Clara-Zetkin-Park, and in winter the Spinnerei is the place where the weather does not matter — halls with north light work as well in January as in June. The book fair in March fills the city for four days.
Here is where to shoot in Leipzig, with ideal times and permit notes.
Ten hectares of brick, cobbles and multi-pane windows that have been worked in for a hundred and twenty years — cotton first, art now. The yards are open, the halls are not; anyone who wants an interior asks the tenant beforehand, and that takes a few days.
A nineteenth-century industrial canal with brick bridges, towpaths and canoes on it. This is Leipzig’s own subject: not a historic centre but working architecture on water that nobody has tidied up for a postcard.
Ninety-one metres of granite above a reflecting pool — the largest monument in Europe, and impossible to read the scale of until a person stands in front of it. It faces east, so the morning is when the front takes light.
The park runs into the floodplain forest with no boundary between them, and that forest runs six kilometres through the city. In spring there is wild garlic under a canopy that has not closed yet — for two weeks, the softest green any German city has.
Leipzig has a connected system of covered arcades from its trade-fair years, and the Mädlerpassage with Auerbachs Keller is the most elaborate of them. In the rain that is an entire session location under cover, with daylight from above.
These come under the Leipzig rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Leipzig itself.
Onto the site, yes — during the day and free; the yards, lanes and facades carry a whole session on their own. Into the halls only if the tenant agrees, because those are working studios and galleries. We ask in advance if an interior is meant to be part of the plan, and allow a few days for it.
Yes, and for a very practical reason: the city costs markedly less than Munich or Hamburg without offering less. Registry office in the Neues Rathaus, reception in a Spinnerei hall or a manor outside town, couple photographs on the canal — all of it inside twenty minutes. The thing to plan around is the book fair in March.
Roughly mid-April to early May, and the window is narrow — two or three weeks, after which the canopy closes and the forest floor goes dark. If you want those photographs, keep the date flexible and we set it by what the wood is doing rather than by the calendar.