A major retrospective of East German photographer Helga Paris opens at Fotografiska Berlin, showcasing over 200 prints from her vast archive of 230,000 negatives. The exhibition, titled "Helga Paris. For Us," presents an intimate portrait of life in the former German Democratic Republic through the lens of one of the country's most celebrated photographers, who died at age 87 in February of last year.
The centerpiece of the exhibition captures a snow-filled Berlin street where a church tower barely emerges as a silhouette in the distance. The sidewalk and road appear pristine white, unmarked by tire tracks or footprints. This photograph, taken over forty years ago in what was then East Berlin, breathes with the atmosphere of a vanished world. It evokes not only the political system that allowed its citizens far fewer cars than today, but also serves as a frozen image of climate change, representing winters that rarely occur in modern Berlin.
Helga Paris was never a professional photographer in the strictest sense, despite making photography her life's work and becoming one of the great artists of her time. She came to photography through circumstance and friendly advice, never losing the shyness she felt when pointing her camera at people and places. This hesitancy became her greatest strength, allowing her to create portraits with an indescribable quality that remained both time-bound and concrete to their specific situations, while expressing something universal about humanity that transcends time.
The exhibition, curated by Marina Paulenka of Fotografiska and former National Gallery director Udo Kittelmann, draws from an estate managed by the photographer's daughter Jenny. It represents the first major showing since Paris's death, following a comprehensive 2019 exhibition at the Academy of Arts, where she had been a member since 1996. The venue itself carries symbolic weight – Fotografiska has taken over and meticulously restored the legendary Tacheles building, once a countercultural center in East Berlin.
For international audiences, the photographs present a double foreignness: the temporal distance and the gap from a lived reality that even today's Berliners would find remote. The people in Paris's images belong entirely to another world – unlike the renovated Tacheles building, they could never have grown into the new era following the end of East Germany. The photographer captured an entire epoch through its people, and her gradual loss of enthusiasm for photography after German reunification, eventually setting down her camera years before her death, testifies to the intimate relationship between artist and subject.
The exhibition features several series showcasing Paris's range and humanity. Visitors can see her portraits of female workers at the VEB Treff-Modelle clothing factory, patrons of Berlin bars, punks including friends of her son Robert, and particularly moving images of nursing home residents from 1980. Each series demonstrates her consistent approach: she remained reserved yet engaged, never seeking to expose or embarrass her subjects, even when documenting difficult conditions.
Born in 1938 in Gollnow, Pomerania, Paris fled with her mother and sister in 1945, barely escaping the advancing Red Army. This experience instilled in her a profound respect for all human life, regardless of material circumstances. The dignity she accorded each subject reflects her belief in the inviolable dignity of every person. Her aesthetic was influenced by Italian neorealism films she could see in the years before the Berlin Wall was built, and she remained faithful to black and white photography throughout her career.
Originally trained as a fashion designer, Paris came to photography somewhat accidentally in the mid-1960s and developed her skills as an autodidact. She preferred working with a tripod for her medium-format viewfinder camera, with which she created self-portraits that revealed her as a perpetual seeker. One such self-portrait, reproduced life-size, marks the entrance to the Fotografiska exhibition and sets the tone for the entire show.
During the later years of East Germany, as a recognized photographer and member of the Artists' Union, Paris was permitted to travel to visit her sister in Canada. On the way, she photographed in New York, overwhelmed by the otherness of the metropolis. She was able to exhibit these New York images in East Berlin in the fall of 1989. While these photographs receive considerable space at Fotografiska, perhaps too much, the urban scenes from East Berlin receive somewhat less attention, though they provide crucial context for understanding her portrait work.
Particularly significant are her images documenting the decay of Halle an der Saale, a series that was banned from exhibition in East Germany. These urban landscapes capture both the architectural tristesse and the spatial intimacy within which her portraits of laughing, sad, bitter, hopeful, and hopeless people emerged. The exhibition title alludes to this context, borrowed from fellow East Berlin poet Bert Papenfuß.
Paris lived for almost six decades in Prenzlauer Berg, the neighborhood that became the bohemian district of East Berlin. The area's turn-of-the-century buildings featured coal heating but also grand doors with a generosity that matched the intellectual generosity of their inhabitants. Her husband, painter Roland Paris, had brought her to the neighborhood, and she remained in their apartment with both children after their divorce. From this base, she received and photographed artists and fellow bohemians, from playwright Heiner Müller to the notorious Sascha Anderson.
From Prenzlauer Berg, she ventured to nearby bars and workplaces, including accompanying garbage collectors who became the subject of another series. Several of her series were published in Magazin, a small-format entertainment publication that operated somewhat under the radar. The exhibition displays two issues of the magazine in vitrines, while all prints hang on lime-green backgrounds with precise lighting, immaculately arranged as expected from this highly professional institution, accompanied by an excellently printed catalog.
Paris once noted that she could not have made a living as a freelance photographer given her working methods, yet she turned down offers for steady employment, such as a position as a theater photographer. She insisted on working only according to her own standards. In the diverse photography scene of East Germany, Paris was less the singular figure she is seen as today alongside contemporaries like Evelyn Richter and Sibylle Bergemann.
The interest in fellow human beings and collectively shared fate represents one of the defining characteristics and strengths of photography in a country that was enveloped equally by snowfall and brown coal smog, as seen in another of Paris's images from Prenzlauer Berg. Today, there exists greater clarity but also greater foreignness, not least from ourselves, in viewing this vanished world captured through her compassionate lens.
The exhibition "Helga Paris. For Us" runs at Fotografiska Berlin through January 25, 2026, with an accompanying book published by Kehrer Verlag available for 48 euros.
