The West Berlin Years

Photographs by André Kirchner 1981 through 1990

André Kirchner

To commemorate André Kirchner’s sixtieth birthday, the Haus am Kleistpark presents a selection of approximately one hundred of his early black-and-white photographs from the years 1981 to 1990, the majority of which have never before been published. Kirchner began photographing Berlin more than thirty-five years ago. From the very beginning, the city’s history has been a major theme for Kirchner, who came to West Berlin in 1981 as a student and soon resumed his autodidactic pursuits with the camera. Kirchner’s subdued photographs of West Berlin’s streets and fallow grounds tell the story of the city’s history; in an almost casual way, he uses the 35-mm camera to note things he then, from 1988 on, transfers into systematic series taken with a large-format camera. The poetic realism of his photographs simultaneously reveal and conceal what the astonished viewer is able to glean from these well-known street views, which are always taken at eye level.