AMSTERDAM.- As a result of the Cold War, the remarkable oeuvre of the German photographer Helga Paris (1938) was long almost unknown west of the Iron Curtain. While Paris enjoyed widespread popularity in East Germany, her photographs rarely reached a public in the West. Although her work, with its quite intimate glimpses of daily life in East Germany, is strongly linked to the course of her own life, its expressiveness is universal. The empathy of her gaze makes it easy for us to imagine ourselves in the people and places she photographed.

Resilience
On one hand Helga Paris’ photographs are about life in the German Democratic Republic (DDR), where the Second World War and the country’s communist regime brought restriction, loss, destruction and decline in their wake. On the other they show the gaze of a photographer who had been born in Pommeren (now in Poland), who grew up close to postwar Berlin, and who faced the world with resilience, curiosity and compassion. In 1966 Paris moved for good to Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, a traditionally working-class district that had become a refuge for bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals, closely watched but condoned by the authorities. Here she became a chronicler of postwar East Germany. She often worked in the immediate surroundings – taking photographs of friends and neighbours, on the street, and in bars and cafés.

Hidden tensions
Although in the 1970s and 1980s Helga Paris also photographed in Romania, Poland and Georgia, the accent in the Huis Marseille exhibition is on East Germany before and after the Wende (1989–90). She created the series Berliner Jugendliche (Berlin Youth) in 1980–81, when her own children were teenagers, portraying youngsters who believed in an alternative way of life and who went to the concerts given by independent bands – a sort of East German variant of the Western punk scene. Their anarchic lifestyle did not go unnoticed by the regime, and many of those she portrayed also spent some time in prison. Paris subtly but revealingly captures the hidden tensions of the time in the teenagers’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions. She elicited a similar scale of reactions in the workers she photographed for the series Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin (Women at the textile factory VEB Models, 1984): from self-confident and open to confrontational and defensive.

Run-down
In the same period Helga Paris documented the decline of the old city centre of Halle, interspersing photos of the city’s long-neglected buildings and streets with portraits of its residents – who only allowed themselves to be photographed if they had a say in how their portraits were taken. The impoverishment of Halle was only partly the result of the faltering East German economy; the government was also deliberately allowing the historic centre of Halle and other East German cities to become rundown in order to compel their populations to move into modern flats on urban peripheries. The exhibition Häuser und Gesichter: Halle 1983–85 was banned by the regime in 1987; it was 1990 before the people of Halle could see the photographs for themselves.

An encounter with oneself
In 1981 Paris began work on a series of self-portraits that had not originally been intended for exhibition. The photos arose out of her fascination for the changes she saw happening in her face whenever she looked in the mirror: a kind of ‘encounter with oneself’. She made these portraits between 1981 and 1989, one of the most productive periods in her working life. Hints of the external pressures and inner tensions that she was experiencing at the time have seeped into these portraits.

A sense of instability
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 Paris took fewer photographs for a while, feeling that the new social circumstances obliged her to rethink her position as a photographer in the world. The sense of instability that was brought about by the political upheaval of 1989–90 finds expression in her working methods. In the series Friedrichshain, Berlin (1993) and Erinnerungen an Z. (1994), about her childhood in Zossen, Paris included strong close-ups and photographic blurring in her photographs for the first time. Searching for images that would express her feelings, she also started working with models. For the series Hellersdorf (1998) she returned to her customarily direct style, portraying children growing up in the new, united Germany – while living in a housing project in Berlin-Hellersdorf, the last example of the hated Plattenbau that the DDR had built shortly before its own demise.

Helga Paris was born Helga Steffens in 1938 in Gollnow, Pommeren, now known as Goleniów in Poland. At the end of the war she fled with her family to Zossen, her father’s native city. She first came into contact with photography through an aunt who worked in a photographic laboratory. Between 1956 and 1960 she studied fashion design at the Fachschule für Bekleidung in Berlin. There she met the artist Ronald Paris, to whom she was married between 1961 and 1974, and with whom she had two children.

Via the Arbeiter- und Studententheater in Berlin, for which she made costumes, Paris came into contact with the later documentary maker Peter Voigt, who encouraged her to take more photographs. To improve her techniques, from 1967 to 1968 she worked in the Deutsche Werbe- und Anzeigengesellschaft DEWAG photographic laboratory. She took many photographs in the theatre, such as productions of the Volksbühne, as her husband was also its set designer. In later years she would say that this experience had given her a solid foundation for her attitude to space as a street photographer.

Paris’s work was first exhibited in 1978, in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden. In 1996 she became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Her self-portraits were a great success at the Kunst in der DDR exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2003), and in 2004 Helga Paris was awarded the prestigious Hannah-Höch-Preis for a lifetime of achievement in the arts.

Futures Past & Present
Helga Paris’ work, including seven portfolios which are being exhibited in full for the first time, are on view as part of Futures Past & Present. This exhibition shows the work of four female photographers: Céline van Balen, Julie Greve, Esther Kroon and Helga Paris. The four have separate individual histories, but they also have something in common: they all show great talent, and the ascent – or demise – of their careers has been determined by unusual factors: personal circumstances, fate, or the time and place of their birth. The four are also linked by their exceptional ability to engage directly with their subjects, a skill revealed by their portrait work in particular. Their models are portrayed in all their strength and dignity, with subtle distinctions between personalities.