Borussia Dortmund, The major football team of the city of Dortmund is the beating heart of that place and affects almost any everyday aspect you can think of. BVB is an Actual religion there.
"Dortmunder: A City in Black & Yellow is a photograph research I made During my time living in the city as part of the Exchange students program. The project is an observation about the Football culture and its affections on the lives in the city. This is a summary of one of the most fascinating places the German football culture has to offer.
The first thing I was able to identify is how much Borussia Dortmund (BVB) has an influence on every area that exists here. From the cultural and economic level, through the infrastructure to the visual level, this city breathes BVB everywhere you look. Everything here is yellow: There are well-known fashion chains that have a target audience-oriented collection of yellow clothes on the shelves and in the shop windows. Wherever you turn your head from the suburbs to the city center you see yellow everywhere.
Metro stations in the city center are painted yellow (as a decision, not graffiti), pubs become temples of the team, there is not a single street pole or toilet stall in the city that does not have a sticker of one of the hundreds of fan clubs that exist for the team in the city, country, continent.
Metro stations in the city center are painted yellow (as a decision, not graffiti), pubs become temples of the team, there is not a single street pole or toilet stall in the city that does not have a sticker of one of the hundreds of fan clubs that exist for the team in the city, country, continent.
Signal Iduna Park (Or Westfallen stadion) is the place where the magic happens. Unfortunately, in such a short time I had, finding a story and capture it in a crowded 82,000-person stadium was impossible... so I started looking for an interesting story somewhere else.
I started going to the reserve and youth team matches of Borussia Dortmund (who play in the fourth division in Germany).
There, I met the sweetest part of German football culture. Besides the surprise of arriving at a game that has almost zero sporting importance and discovering there thousands of fans cheering and singing for 90 minutes as if it were the club's top team, the most refreshing thing to see in the stands is families: full families who come to enjoy sunday football together, Sometimes even two parents, two uncles, two children and the cousins all go on Sunday or Saturday afternoon to watch football together as if it were a family picnic.
You could see all the combinations here: a father with a girl, a mother with a child(ren), a full family... all dressed in yellow and coming to watch football. I was lucky and 3 families also let me photograph them and interview them.
This project was a great milestone in my understanding football cultures and enlightened me points about the place from which people love football, about how exciting this culture is, but mainly about the differences between the sports culture in Israel and that in Germany and the differences between them.
