BERLIN.- The exhibition unites the work – and life paths – of three photographers in Berlin in the 1990s, the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The three photographers share an outside perspective onto the foreign city that was just starting to become one again after the devastation caused by bombing and demolition, highway construction and the Wall. In 1990/91, their paths crossed for the first time through their joint interest in urban photography.

Peter Thieme and André Kirchner are equally fascinated by the urban wastelands as they are of the architectural voids that they turned upside down on the matt screen of their large-format analog cameras. Nelly Rau-Häring, by contrast, put people at the center of her work.

The classic photographs range from the documentary to the poetic, conveying the atmosphere in Berlin in those years. This enables us not only to explore the transformation of the city of Berlin and the influence of history on the lives of individuals, but also to trace the development of photography in the spectrum between documentary approaches and artistic auteur photography.

Born in Switzerland, Nelly Rau-Häring came to West Berlin in 1965 to learn photography at Lette-Verein. She worked as a freelance photographer in Berlin until her return to Basel in 2006. She maintained her ties to the city via many exhibitions and publications about Berlin, East and West, most recently in a monograph published by Edition Frölich.

André Kirchner, who grew up in Munich, came to West Berlin in 1981 as a student of classical philology at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin). He soon dropped out in order to devote himself entirely to photography, which he learned autodidactically. In 1984/85 he attended the “Werkstatt für Photographie” (“workshop for photography,” a school based in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district) and has lived in Berlin as a photographer, author, and gallerist ever since.

Peter Thieme, born in Chemnitz, studied photography from 1986 to 1991 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst). In 1988 he moved to East Berlin and has since lived in Berlin as a freelance photographer and lecturer in photography.