Haus am Kleistpark

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 a spectrum between documentary approaches and artistic auteur photography.