BERLIN.- Helga Paris documented everyday life with a quiet eye. Her empathy and unwavering curiosity allowed her to connect deeply with the people and settings she photographed. She always approached her subjects with profound respect — whether strangers, acquaintances, or those she encountered by chance. Her pictures go beyond merely documenting a vanished GDR; they are intimate portraits of dignity, connection, and lived experience.
Fotografiska Berlin is presenting für uns, the first large-scale exhibition of the photographer’s work since her passing on February 5, 2024 at the age of 85. The exhibition, curated by Marina Paulenka, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska Berlin and Udo Kittelmann, the long- time director of the Nationalgalerie Berlin, pays comprehensive tribute to Paris’ work while tracing her lasting influence.
“This exhibition is not merely a retrospective. It is an act of remembrance, of solidarity, and of gratitude for an artist who, with every image, seemed to say: I see you,” explains Udo Kittelmann.
On view are key series spanning five decades - among them Treff-Modelle, a striking sequence of portraits of women in an East Berlin fashion factory; Berliner Jugendliche, an observant, nonjudgmental study of teenagers in the 1980s; and Hellersdorf, made after the fall of the Berlin Wall in a Plattenbau district in the midst of change. Also included are her Künstlerportraits - poets, painters, the culturally engaged - alongside the city-poems of Mein Alex and Berliner Kneipen.
At times, Helga Paris’s photography intersects with her own biography. Especially poignant is Erinnerungen an Z. (Memories of Z.), in which fragments of text and image come together to evoke her childhood in Zossen, Brandenburg. Equally affecting are her self-portraits, marked by a quiet vulnerability. These images are neither performative nor confessional; they are clear-eyed records of the present moment and reflect the emotional range of a woman confronting her own ageing with a watchful lens. The delightfully strange series Masks, with friends and relatives in homemade disguises, along with photographs from New York and Rome, and the tender, posthumously curated Affections, complete the portrait of a richly layered artistic life.
Borrowed from a text by GDR poet Bert Papenfuß, the exhibition’s title reminds us that life and survival are often shared efforts. It speaks directly to the essence of Paris’s work: her steady and unhurried gaze met others not from above, but with them. Her approach was gradual and respectful – observing quietly, often over long periods, and waiting patiently for the moment that felt right. “Helga Paris’s photographs may be more resonant today than ever. They never chased the zeitgeist, but instead followed her enduring curiosity about people. In a time of renewed division, her work quietly reminds us of what continues to bind us,” says Marina Paulenka. Für uns stands as a tribute to a great artist, and as an invitation to linger - with the people, their stories, their faces.
Alongside the exhibition, the accompanying book für uns will be published by Kehrer Verlag. In addition to a selection of photographs, it features personal texts by Helga Paris herself – typed on her own typewriter.
Helga Paris came to photography in the mid-1960s – untrained but instinctively drawn to it, driven by a quiet desire to better understand those around her. Her sharp instinct for composition, nuance, and the ephemeral helped shape a distinctive visual style. Born in May 1938 in Gollnow, now part of Poland, she was raised in Zossen near Berlin. From 1956 to 1960, she studied fashion design at the Fachschule für Bekleidung in Berlin, later working as a costume design teacher, graphic designer, and photo lab assistant. By the late 1960s she had emerged as a defining voice in East German photography, capturing everyday life with quiet clarity and deep empathy. In 2004, she received the Hannah Höch Prize in recognition of her life's work. Her archive, including all negatives, is preserved by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste.
