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East German photographer Helga Paris
Helga Paris, born in 1938 in Gollnow in Pomerania, now Goleniów in Poland, grew up in Zossen near Berlin in a working class family. She studied fashion design, worked as a graphic artist, and married the painter Ronald Paris. From 1964, she took photographs of her surroundings in the Prenzlauer Berg area of Berlin: her children, neighbours, street scenes. Self-trained, she intensified her photographic work and studied technology. Since 1968 she has been a freelance photographer.

People without masks
Even today, Paris works almost exclusively in black and white. She explains this choice by saying: "There is still so much to be done in black and white." She works with natural light, and her compositions are simple – she doesn't stage-set scenes, but documents them. Since her autobiographical series Erinnerungen an Z. (i.e. Memories of Z). and Friedrichshain from 1993/94, she sometimes uses unfocused pictures to represent her mental images. In her memories, she explains, it is typical that one aspect is in sharp relief while the rest is out of focus. She also says that she came across this technique somewhat by chance: one picture in a particular series was blurred, and because she liked the resulting effect, she started from then on to use this intentionally in her work. Ever since, she has also used a larger picture format.

She appears always to have been interested by individuals. When she does portraits of people she tries to impress upon them that there is no need for the "typical embarrassed smile". Apart from that, they can appear as they wish, completely as they are, before the camera, and this gives her portraits a very natural feel. Her work in Transylvania, she says, influenced her to the extent that she found that people there would simply position themselves calmly and confidently before the camera, ready to be photographed. In a programme called Kulturjournal broadcast by North German television station NDR, she said the following about her pub photos which were taken in East Berlin in the 1970s: "People in the east had no masks whatsoever. They really let out whatever they happened to be feeling."

Photography as a form of protest
Under no circumstances did Helga Paris want to photograph what the media in the GDR presented as reality, but rather the opposite. "But this had nothing to do with some high-flown political ambition, but arose from a sense of reality and truthfulness", as she explained in the Kulturjournal programme. "I knew I didn't want to go to prison. I will protest as much as I can without putting myself in any danger." In 1986, shortly before its opening, an exhibition of a series of photographs taken from 1983 to 1985 entitled Häuser und Gesichter (i. e. Halle, Buildings and Faces), was forbidden because it showed how the city's buildings were falling into disrepair. The photographs were not exhibited until 1990.

"My pictures express what I wanted to say. I took the many faces with me into the new era to ensure that nothing would be forgotten", says Paris in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung. Currently, she is working in Berlin on a series entitled Menschen am Alexanderplatz (i. e. People at Alexanderplatz). "I search for images which have their origins in the city's history and point to a possible future", she says.

Trained by painting
Self-taught Paris does not belong to any particular school of photography – indeed for a long time she even avoided looking at books of photography so as not to be influenced. As she says: "You don't forget a good photo." Instead, she spent a lot of time studying painting and artists like Max Beckmann, Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon. Nevertheless, she feels that her pictures are more closely related to film than painting, and regards them as documents rather than art. The study of literature, especially the works of her writer friend Christa Wolf, also influenced Paris.

"A philosophizing interest exists there which focuses on the fundamental questions of life", says Ulrich Domröse in the Lexikon der Fotografen, "the images found are experienced and recorded intuitively, and are not rationally sought and thought out. These are symbolic photographs of great formal and aesthetic charm".

Exhibitions in Hanover and Berlin
Works by Helga Paris can currently be viewed in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. The exhibition concentrates on the early individual images and series, most of which were taken in Berlin, such as Berliner Kneipen, Berliner Jugendliche (i. e. Berlin Pubs, Berlin Young People) (1981-82) and Frauen im Bekleidungswerk Treff-Modelle (i. e. Women at the Treff-Modelle Clothing Factory) (1984). Simultaneously, an exhibition in the Berlinische Galerie attempts to give as broad an overview as possible of Paris' creations using just 52 works. Photographs from the Halle series Häuser und Gesichter (i. e. Buildings and Faces) are on show, as are Erinnerungen an Z. (i. e. Memories of Z). and the Il Legionario pictures taken in Rome.

The truthfulness of life
Helga Paris "liberates those portrayed from their sense of being the object", said Senator Thomas Flierl in praise of her work at the award ceremony in the Berlinische Galerie, quoting lyricist Elke Erb. Ulrich Domröse, Director of the Photographic Collection of the Berlinische Galerie, said in his speech that Paris' objective was to reflect the truthfulness of life by portraying everyday life and the naturalness of people. This was the third time that a photographer won the Hannah-Höch Prize, which was awarded for the ninth time by the Berlin Senate Administration for an artist's life's work. Helga Paris thanked the people she has been allowed to photograph over the years for their trust.

Inka Schube (Ed.): Helga Paris. Photographs, Holzwarth Publications, 320 pages, 45 €, ISBN 3-935567-19-7 Ingrid Scheffer is a freelance journalist and a graduate in cultural studies

Translation: Chris Cave Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion

Any questions about this article? Please write! online-redaktion@goethe.de updated January 2007