In a small office in one of the famous courtyard houses of Berlin Kreuzberg one can find the Umbruch-Bildarchiv. This media initiative was established to struggle ”against the underexposure of the leftwing movement”. But the leftist movement is not the sole focus of their attention. Umbruch Bildarchiv runs a variety of projects with young people and school students' initiatives from Berlin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with migrants and refugees, from web design to poster layout and video editing. Umbruch Bildarchiv amplifies the voices of those who try to speak out.

Umbruch Bildarchiv began as an off-line media initiative in 1988 and went online in 1999. Fotographs, videoclips, films and other images of social, cultural or political events are collected, archived and digitalized here.

This simple combination of archiving and producing media produces a powerful synergy, where young people can look at and be inspired by old material, but can also recycle the old photographs, images and drawings, giving them new meaning by placing them in a different context. In this way materials, ideas as well as skills, are not just accessible for all different movements but they are easily shared without having to sign complicated and restrictive copyright contracts: the basis of exchange is simply trust. The trust that my photographs will be most useful if as many people as possible use them.

The main focus of Umbruch Bildarchiv is producing independent media coverage of political events and struggles and providing access for those people who don’t have the skills or the technical equipment to produce media coverage themselves. So Umbruch focuses on these two main aspects, as can easily be understood from their homepage.

The focus on independent media coverage started long before the days of indymedia which has made the idea of independent media famous. In sections “Event” and “Bildarchiv” one can view documentation of protest action. The Event section includes recent actions as well as those about to happen. The Bildarchiv, which could be translated as picture archiv, gives the oppurtunity to browse five years of protest: from 1998 to 2003. Some material is online, though much of it can only be examined in the offline archiv.

The most interesting and regularly visited part of the online presentation is the video section. A huge collection of short videoclips and documentaries can be watched in 56 K streaming quality. This impressive collection has been produced in the course of documenting various protest actions and provides a very good overview of actions that have taken place mostly around the topic of migration and racism: interviews with youth initiatives that try to fight neonazi presence in their cities, interviews with refugees where they talk talk about their living conditions and impressions from demonstrations. The format that Umbruch had developed so sucessfully is very simple: a multimedia presentation comprising very short texts, some links, some pictures one can scroll through as well as a short piece of video.

“Sick of too many trite words, we started looking for a language of pictures. A language that can embrace the liveliness and the defiance with which people here and elsewhere resist.” remembers Hermann, who has been there since the very beginning. He is also the founder of the RefugeeVideo Window. This part of the website is reserved for refugees to tell stories about their own personal experiences, their reasons for leaving their home countries and their struggles in Germany. The idea of empowerment is not a new one for Umbruch – Bildarchiv. On- and offline they have been partners in helping people to layout or edit their material, to learn the basics of public relations work, teaching editing or filming stories and helping to create websites or upload material.

For them, learning by doing has proved to be the best educational approach. Hermann summarizes the secret of their success: “It’s not just a question of technical knowledge or equipment. First you have to learn that documentation is not something that ‘must be done’ but rather that it’s fun to do and exciting to see afterwards what has happened during the protest.”