Exhibition „ZeitReise“
This year offered me a great gift, as I had the privilege of filling a room at the Städtische Galerie Lüdenscheid with photographs for the second time. What made this occasion particularly special was the fact that these pictures had been taken by a student in his early twenties in a country that no longer exists today. That student was me. Almost 40 years ago, I came to Halle an der Saale, the center of the chemical industry in the GDR, to study art and design.
The images had been rediscovered, digitized, and “developed” by me just a few months before the exhibition. This meant that the entire series of images was not only being seen in its complete form for the first time but also being experienced in a gallery environment.
After three guided tours during the weeks of the exhibition with extremely interested visitors and many questions that stimulated memories, it was very touching to witness the response of the viewers directly and to experience the impact of these photographs.
By chance, the series also had a digital presence on AllAboutPhoto.com, but in the physical exhibition in the gallery, the visual story had a different ending. The images were expanded with three photographs from November 10, 1989. Here, I had stood on top of the Berlin Wall with the gathered crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate and we wondered at the tipping points of history. That moment in Berlin marked the end of an era in Germany, and the “look and feel” of the GDR became more and more unrecognizable and blurred with each passing day. The images from Halle show some of the last moments of a world that knew nothing of the fall of the Iron Curtain or even the following reunification and had no idea how quickly history can change overnight.
