Over the last three decades Helga Paris (born in 1938) has spawned a unique body of pictures. She observes people in their surroundings, examines the development of small social groups within their broader political settings; she documents how time and the march of time have changed her and her subjects. Her series of local Berlin pubs (1974), of dustmen (1979), Berlin youth (1982) and the town of Halle (Diva in Grau, 1987) earned her veritable cult status in East Germany. German reunification further extended her horizon. Her precise gaze is unwavering.

The photographer Helga Paris looks her subjects straight in the eyes. She opposes the predatory gaze of the snapshot with her own approach of the “constructed moment, the culmination of direct communication, the moment of fusion between photographer and subject” (Deike Diening in “Für mich muss keiner lächeln”, Tagesspiegel, 11.3.2003). Her roaming gaze is driven by curiosity for the nuances of human relations, for the endeavours, desires and yearnings of everyday life. Paris is a witness of our time and an artist who lays herself open by asking strangers for permission to photograph them in Berlin and Halle, or her legionnaires in the main station in Rome in 1995, or today in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz square, which she perceives as a metaphor for the growing disparity in our society.

The exquisitely printed monograph Helga Paris: Fotografien Photographs displays the outstanding artistic qualities of her wide-ranging body of images and shows how the perception of life in our times and of individually experienced life overlaps with the constantly changing gaze of the artist. Four essays accompanying the chronological sequence of photographs examine various aspects of Helga Paris’s work. Looking into faces and peering into the worlds of their inner beings, whose history is longer than the fleeting moment of the photograph, we encounter a psychogramme of our times.

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Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes
In collaboration with Sprengel Museum Hannover