Photography in Berlin 1900 – 1980

Steffi Brandl, Fritz Brill, Heinz Hajek-Halke, Erich Salomon, Heinrich Zille

The Berlinische Galerie has one of the most important collections of photography in Germany. As part of the collection’s presentation, it shows Berlin’s contribution to the development of photography through 1980. The exhibition starts with Heinrich Zille’s inimitable street photography from around 1900, followed by modernist photography of the 1920s with works by Heinz Hajek-Halke (photo experiments, macro shots), Fritz Brill (advertising and product photography), Steffi Brandl (portraits) and Erich Salomon (newspaper photography). Representing the fusion of modernism and propaganda in the photography of the Third Reich, which seems so strange today, the archive of the national-conservative newspaper Volk und Welt offers interesting stock. The devastating images of Yevgeny Khaldei and Ivan Mikhaylovich Shagin depict the end of World War II. Carrying on from these, Fritz Kühn’s abstract images of nature from the 1950s symbolize a new beginning. The final images, taken in the 1970s, are from Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer, two German ‘author photographers’.