Helga Paris

Helga Paris

Daniel Berndt

Although Helga Paris, born 1938 in Pomerania, was self-taught and more interested in amateur photography than in so-called fine art photography, a friend suggested she work professionally after he saw a picture she had taken of her two kids. In 1967, she followed his advice. She had finished her degree in fashion design in East Berlin right before the Berlin Wall was built and was working in the textile industry and teaching costume design, yet eventually became frustrated with the constraints of these fields; the rigid standardizations of East Germany’s planned economy didn’t offer much creative leeway. Paris then took a job as a photographer’s assistant and began to explore her neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, capturing its inhabitants and street scenes in melancholic images. In a recent conversation, Paris, now seventy-nine and still residing in Prenzlauer Berg, remarked, "My motivation had nothing to do with my studies as a fashion designer; my interest was always rooted in a documentary approach.”

Originally a working-class district, Prenzlauer Berg became the center of East Germany’s counterculture in the late 1960s: bohemians, intellectuals, artists, and the gay community moved into the area’s run-down Grunderzeit houses, which had been built around 1900. There, Paris encountered the men who became the protagonists of her first series: a group of garbage collectors she followed on their route, from the early morning until they went for after-work drinks in neighborhood bars. Paris chronicled a wide swath of Berlin’s social spectrum—from teenagers and young punks to elderly people in retirement homes to female textile mill workers—creating an image of real socialism that speaks of both the system’s ideals of social equality and its failures.

Most of the self-styled young punks pictured in Paris’s work were photographed in the early 1980s in her apartment or her building’s stairwell. Despite intimidating appearances, Paris was struck by their sensitivity and tenderness. "Only years later I discovered that Almo, whom I had photographed at the door, was always holding his hand under his burning cigarette so that the ashes would not fall to the ground,” she said. "This gesture always touched me. When I was working on a bigger exhibition,

I decided to photograph other, quite normal-looking teenagers to present a more diverse picture of Berlin youths.”

In contrast to many of her peers, Paris exhibited her work widely, in and outside of the German Democratic Republic.

Still, making a living from art was difficult. She earned extra income by taking on commissions, most often making reproductions of other artists’ paintings and sculptures, or shooting portraits of writers, including Sarah Kirsch and Christa Wolf. Only recently, as interest in her generation of East German photographers (such as Sibylle Bergemann and Arno Fischer) developed, has Paris received the recognition she deserves; in 2004, she was awarded the prestigious Hannah Hoch Prize, followed by a major retrospective at the Sprengel Museum, in Hannover, that same year. In the spring of 2017, Wolfgang Tillmans organized a small exhibition of her photographs, titled Berlin, at Between Bridges, his Berlin project space.

Paris stopped photographing in 2008 and has since focused on sifting through her archive, rearranging and compiling the works into new constellations. Her series Berlin, 1972-1982 / Mappe 3 (2010), shown at Between Bridges, mixes images from two of the artist’s earliest series—Trash Collectors and Berlin Bars (both 1974)—with shots of friends, family, and neighbors.

Not unlike a Tillmans installation, these arrangements create links between different subject matters and periods of work. However, her recent exhibition was, above all, an homage to Berlin, or rather the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood that has shaped her work deeply and consistently over the past fifty years.

Daniel Berndt is a research associate for the Politics of the Image project at the German Literature Archive, Marbach.

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