Helga Paris was born in Gollnow (Pommern) in 1938, a photographer who became known for her everyday and socially critical photographs in East Germany. The following photographs are just a few that reminded me so much my background growing up in Germany of the 70s and 80s, the melancholic mood that was so omnipresent in the society with the cold war and separation between East and West Germany at the time. It all changed later in the 90s and the new millenium, and the taste and odor of my childhood days seem long past… I always believed these impressions were unique and personal, not some that a lot of other people would share with me. The following photos surprised me because they do reflect all these memories of my own childhood and family. I can even remember what the hallways of these post-war multifamily houses smelled like, a mixture of building materials, home-cooked meals, smoke and coal. To keep it short, these photographs capture impressions that only existed in my memories before. They make me feel “at home”.
Helga Paris/ From: Berlin Pubs; 1974
Helga Paris/ From: Berlin Pubs; 1974
Helga Paris/ From: Georgia; 1982
Helga Paris/ From: The Polish Journey; 1996-1997
Helga Paris/ From: Berlin Youth, Gabi; 1982
Helga Paris/ From: Women at the Treff-Modelle Clothing Factory, Berlin; 1984
For more pictures by Helga Paris, please visit Zoltán Jókay’s visual log Zeitmaschine. He posted a series of pictures in A Taste of Post-war and Self-portraits and also gives a few interesting infos and comments.
There is something about Helga Paris’s pictures which speak of experiences and feelings that are communicable to a strong degree because they can be shared. (…)Her pictures have a psychological quality that permits identification in an unique way. It is my claim that this can be found in the respect and esteem for the subject that Helga Paris’s pictures are capable of expressing. Perhaps it is the longing to be observed by such a gaze: a gaze that is capable of seeing through the debris and upheavals of everyday life to that what Elke Erb so fittingly calls “cradle honesty”; a gaze in which the individual is capable recognizing himself through the anonymity of the masses by virtue of his own, personal longing for human togetherness.
—Inka Schube, curator at the Sprengel Museum
Please see photos of Halle(Saale) at the above link and forward the link to Frau Paris.
Photos of Halle(Saale) from 1984 at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eastgermanpics/collections/72157603297165002/
Thank you for sharing your photostream! You captured a part of Germany’s history that is very familiar and at the same time hidden or alien to me while I was growing up there. Amazing, and haunting pictures.
Thank you. I wish I had had more time in Halle in March 1984, but I was only there for 4 days. Of course, I had no idea that much more accomplished photographers like Helga Paris and Sigrid Schuetze-Rodemann were walking the same streets with their cameras at that time.