HALLE.- The Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) opened today a major exhibition dedicated to one of the most memorable photographic portraits of East Germany: Helga Paris’s Häuser und Gesichter. Halle 1983–85.

On view from June 12 through September 20, 2026, the exhibition brings together Paris’s powerful series of 101 black-and-white photographs made in Halle during the mid-1980s. Known through the title Diva in Grau — “Diva in Grey” — the cycle captures the city at a moment of tension, beauty and decay, when industrial haze, neglected architecture and everyday human presence formed a striking visual record of urban life in the German Democratic Republic.

Paris, who lived from 1938 to 2024, created the series after photographer Arno Fischer encouraged colleagues in the early 1980s to document the GDR in the social documentary tradition of American photography of the 1930s. Her response was immediate: “I’ll take Halle.” The city was familiar to her through her daughter, Jenny Paris, who was training there, but Paris approached it with the eyes of an outsider.

“I photographed Halle like a foreign city in a foreign country,” Paris later said, describing her attempt to forget everything she thought she knew or understood. “As if, for example, I had been photographing in Rome.”

At the time, Halle was one of the largest industrial centers in the GDR. Its factories had cast a misty grey veil over the city, while many of its historic buildings had fallen into alarming disrepair. Paris did not photograph this reality as accusation, but with a rare combination of clarity and tenderness. Her images bring together atmospheric views of architecture and portraits of residents whose faces seem inseparable from the city around them.

That honesty made the work controversial. In 1986, the photographs were scheduled to be shown for the first time at Galerie Marktschlößchen in Halle, then operated by the Association of Visual Artists in the GDR. The exhibition never opened. Cultural officials saw the images of inner-city decay as an implicit challenge to urban planning policy, a politically sensitive issue at the time. The show was suppressed and the catalogue was withdrawn.

The following year, the Council of the Halle District commissioned photographer Konstanze Göbel to create what was intended as a counter-project, one that would emphasize the city’s transformation and new buildings. Yet Göbel’s photographs, completed in 1989, have often been read less as a contradiction of Paris’s work than as a continuation of its questioning spirit.

In May 1989, the Halle art museum acquired Paris’s photographs, but the series could not finally be shown until 1990, after the political changes that reshaped Germany and Europe.

Forty years after the blocked 1986 exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle now revisits the series not only as a landmark of photographic history, but also as a document with a complex afterlife. The exhibition presents the original prints and traces the dramatic history of the project through archival material. Seen against the present-day city, Paris’s “Diva in Grey” also opens a conversation about Halle’s transformation into what the museum calls a “Diva in Green.”

The accompanying catalogue introduces Helga Paris as one of the most important East German photographers, tells the story behind the photographs and includes voices of contemporary witnesses.

The exhibition also forms part of a broader look at images of Halle. From July 10 to September 20, 2026, the museum will present Reiner Leist’s 360-degree panorama of the Saale city in the tower cabinet of the west wing. At the same time, the Literaturhaus Halle is showing Konstanze Göbel’s Halle series, completed in 1989, through August 16.