Cities are experienced on streets. Ever since the rise of modern metropolises, photography has succeeded above all other means in providing impressions of urban and big-city life.
The emerging city of Berlin has been a source of particular inspiration to photographers and artists since the mid-1800s. They came to Berlin to capture the vibrant life on backstreets and boulevards and at parades and protests, but also the hardships of daily urban life and the inhospitableness of urban spaces.
Their historical images testify to the eventful history of Berlin – a city that experienced unique phases of modernization, destruction, reconstruction, economic renewal, division and reunification. These distinctive photographs also reflect subjective points of view and innovative pictoral languages, and this allows them additionally to represent groundbreaking developments in the history of photography.
The exhibition “Life on the Streets of the City. Berlin in Photographs 1880-1990” covers 110 years of urban and cultural history. The images contained here show Berlin as an imperial capital, as an open metropolis, as the center of Nazi dictatorship and as a divided city during the East-West conflict. The exhibition ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, thus recollecting the historical situation from which emerged the city partnership between Berlin and Moscow 20 years ago.
This exhibition gives the Berlinische Galerie an opportunity to showcase its photography collection, which counts among the most important of its kind in Germany. The exhibition contains large-scale reproductions of photographs from the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. The selection of photos represents the specific emphases of the collection. It focuses on trends in modern photography, new approaches pursued by the “auteur photography” of the 1970s and photography in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It also showcases photography that combines a high level of craftsmanship with the unique status of historical document and autonomous work of art.
The photographs will be presented on a boulevard in Moscow and thus in the space from which they originated, i.e., the street. In presenting the images in this manner, the exhibition addresses city inhabitants and passers-by directly, inviting them on a walk through the history of photography and the many different histories of Berlin.
Among the artists whose work will be on display are F.A. Schwartz, Heinrich Zille, Sasha Stone, Raoul Hausmann, Friedrich Seidenstücker, Georgij Petrussow, Fritz Eschen, Henry Ries, Herbert Tobias, Arno Fischer, Will McBride, Evelyn Richter, Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer.
