Helga Paris documented Prenzlauer Berg when the district was still a working class district in East Berlin. Born in 1938 in Goleniów (Gollnow), West Pomerania, Paris grew up in Zossen near Berlin.
Trained in modernist painting, early Soviet, Italian and French cinema, theater and poetry. For her photos she found people in Berlin, Georgia or Transylvania; she photographed young men in Roman train station district, women in Poland and passers-by on Alexanderplatz.