Berlin Heartbeats

Night Watch

Philipp von Recklinghausen

Throughout 1992, the photographer Philipp von Recklinghausen accompanied officers from the police station on Brunnenstraße numerous times during their late shifts through Berlin Mitte. Their patrols through the nighttime streets span everything from prostitutes and pimps, gunslingers and drunks, to everyone who hadn’t yet found their place in the new order. The series Nightwatch is an excerpt from the photo book Berlin Heartbeats, which will be published by Suhrkamp in the spring of 2017. The projection in the storefront window of the bookstore ocelot is only a few buildings away from the Brunnenstraße station that was the starting point of the reportage.
Philipp von Recklinghausen came to Berlin in 1989; until 1991, he underwent training in photography at the Lette Verein. In 1991 and 1992 he shot photographs for the neighbourhood newspaper scheinschlag, and in 1993 was the only photographer in Srebrenica. Von Recklinghausen received several awards for the works he made there. He is co-founder of Lux Fotografen and lives and works in Berlin.