Photographer Helga Paris is dead: chronicler of everyday life in the GDR

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Paris self-portrait “I in the Mirror” from 1971: Photographed Halle/Saale “like a foreign city in a foreign country”

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Archive Helga Paris / picture alliance / dpa

The photographer Helga Paris is dead. She died on Monday in her Berlin apartment at the age of 85, her daughter told the dpa news agency. Paris was one of the photographers who vividly captured people in their everyday lives in the GDR with their work.

Born in 1938 in Goleniów (Gollnow), West Pomerania, Paris grew up in Zossen near Berlin. She studied fashion design and initially worked as a graphic designer before becoming self-taught in photography in the 1960s.

Trained in modernist painting, early Soviet, Italian and French cinema, theater and poetry, she found her motifs in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. She moved there in 1966 with her husband at the time, the painter Ronald Paris, and their two children grew up here.

Melancholic look

The works created in Berlin are strongly influenced by Paris' surroundings. At that time, the Prenzlauer Berg district was still characterized by working-class families. Photographs of “Women in the VEB Treffmodelle” clothing factory from 1984 bear witness to this.

She also took photographs at Hackescher Markt, in Halle, Georgia and Poland and at Leipzig Central Station. For her photos she found people in Berlin, Georgia or Transylvania; she photographed young men in the Roman train station district, women in Poland and passers-by on Alexanderplatz. Her poetic, melancholic look is striking.

One of her well-known series is “Berlin Pubs” from 1975. For “Houses and Faces” from Halle from 1983 to 1985, in her own words, she tried to photograph everything “like a foreign city in a foreign country.” Works from 1981/82 provide an insight into “Leipzig Central Station”. The series “Memories of Z.” was created in Zossen near Berlin.

Paris, a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts (AdK) since 1996, donated her archive with almost 230,000 negatives and around 6,300 films to the institution.

Since the 2000s, interest in her work has grown again. In 2004 she had solo exhibitions in Berlin and Hanover. Also at collective exhibitions such as »Transitional Society. Portraits and Scenes 1980-1990” (2009 in the AdK) or “Closed Society. Her works were shown in “Artistic Photography in the GDR 1949-1989” (2012 in the Berlinische Galerie). In 2020, with around 275 photographs from the period from 1968 to 2011, the Academy of Arts hosted the most extensive exhibition to date in her hometown of Berlin.

Feb/dpa