1980. IN BERLIN.

Photographs by Heiko Sievers

Heiko Sievers

“My photographs of West Berlin of the early 1980s depict three things: unknown people out and about, a taste of Berlin’s atmosphere, and the feeling I had while living in this city. I never found out what motivated the people I photographed. I saw, or maybe it’s better to say I found and recorded what corresponded to my own sense of life in Berlin at the time, which presented itself to me as an image. The photos are not portraits; neither are they documentary in nature. They don’t tell the story of the person represented, but rather my own. Despite this, the pictures record fragments of the lives of others, and in doing so, they chronicle everyday moments in Berlin during those years.

The work was born out of fleeting perceptions and turned into a project after I was accepted into Michael Schmidt’s Werkstatt für Photographie in Berlin-Kreuzberg. I recognized myself in the pictures of Schmidt and his students from that period. That’s a long time ago now. My feelings in and for Berlin have changed since 1989. The city and people of the 1980s are history.”
(Heiko Sievers)