The way Holger Biermann lifted the camera to his eye, released it and let the camera fall back down on the belt without stopping for a moment or at least walking a step slower, it happened, as they like to say, faster than you can look.

But he must have seen something before he reacted with lightning speed.

Or, as he puts it: The world has whispered something to him, which he translates into the language of an image.

Here it was three construction workers in conspicuously blue pullovers who were digging up the sidewalk on Friedrichstrasse in front of a conspicuously blue poster.

However, it is quite possible that Holger Biermann did not take the picture because of the coincidence of the colors.

Perhaps he was more interested in the formation of the three men,

perhaps from his perspective and through the slight distortion of the wide-angle lens, they looked like dancers on a stage, captured in the midst of their fluid movements.

Or maybe some passer-by mirrored the workers.

Just as in one of his pictures in the foreground a mother puts her finger in her baby's mouth instead of a pacifier, while in the background a gentleman throws up in broad daylight into the grating of a street drain.

Freddie Langer

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Reiseblatt”.

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The answer may soon be found in one of Biermanns Hefte, his own publication of small booklets that he has published nearly two dozen over the past decade to show what the streets are telling him.

Most of them are dedicated to Berlin and are called "There's enough fear for everyone" and "You can't complain" or just "Original Berlin".

However, there are also several about New York, the city where he began photographing.

It's been more than twenty years since he did an internship there after training as a journalist and on his way to work in the morning there was a boom just three blocks away and he was met by a screaming crowd gathering in front of the collapsing World Trade Center brought to safety.

Quick-witted, Biermann bought five slide films in a convenience store and began to take photographs.

He never stopped doing it.

At the same time, he is least interested in sensations.

Biermann looks for moments in which an action intensifies, a gesture becomes allegory or the everyday slips into the absurd.

By no means does he want to depict the chaos of the city, but to organize it, and one is amazed at how lines and circles combine to form geometric compositions, over which logos on facades and ornaments on clothing lay another pattern.

Nevertheless, Biermann insists that Berlin does not make it easy for a street photographer.

The sidewalks are too wide and there is hardly anyone on most streets.

It lacks the crowds that one knows from New York and Tokyo, into which one can throw oneself or watch for hours from the same point - every second as a new image.

Berlin, on the other hand, he has to walk:

in a zigzag course across Alexanderplatz, from Kastanienallee to Hackescher Markt, from there to Rosenthaler Platz and sometimes a trip to the Zoo train station.

An exhibition shows that the city always meant well with him.

ORIGINAL!

Berlin – Holger Biermann, Willy Brandt House, Berlin;

until October 16th.

The booklets can be browsed and ordered on the photographer's website: www.holger-biermann.de.