Helga Paris (*1938 in Goleniow, Poland) occupies an outstanding position in German photography. Her oeuvre exhibits the poetry of a Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the austerity of an August Sander or Renger-Patzsch. Paris, who has lived in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin since 1966, has chronicled the long history of postwar East Germany. For more than three decades she has directed her gentle yet precise gaze toward the people who live it. Her photographs tell of the melancholy vitality of East Berlin corner pubs and the poetic tristesse of the old streetcars of the seventies. We encounter garbage truck drivers, stubbornly furious or calm teenagers, and proud female textile mill workers. We travel through Georgia and Siebenburgen, and meander through the central German industrial city of Halle, a "diva in gray." But these photographs also tell of the end of the postwar era, of the search for images of childhood and their retrieval. Exhibition schedule: Galerie fur Zeitgenoessische Kunst Leipzig December 7, 2012-January 27, 2013 | Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi March 1-25, 2013 | Deutsch-Aserbaidschanische Kulturgesellschaft "Kapellhaus", Baku April 1-May 31, 2013

Text by: Helga Paris, Inka Schube