Street Photography At The End Of The 80s

A small cardboard box filled with strips of 35mm negatives has been with me for almost 40 years now. A darkroom, necessary to put these pictures on paper, has gone out of fashion over the years. In addition, stacks of new images have piled up on new storage media. But the past catches up with you at some point, they say, and the small box revealed its little treasures.

Halle an der Saale, my place of study a few years before the Wall came down, had a very specific charm. The substance of the buildings and the constitution of the people in this city had something in common and I tried to capture this impression on film. What would happen to the city, the country and the people in the following years was completely unpredictable at the time of the photo shoot. In the photographs, you can see the atmosphere of those years for the last time, before the Marlboro Man and the curved typography of a soft drink manufacturer took over the city’s defining image.