Berlin: The Friction and the Flood

I was still a young man when I first encountered Berlin in the mid-1980s. I travelled there regularly in the wake of my uncle Alex, who had anchored his own life there years before. In those days, the city felt like a well-kept secret, breathing a unique charm that has long since vanished.

The Berlin of that era was a tapestry of raw paradoxes. Grey concrete, watchtowers, and streets that bled abruptly into nothingness existed right alongside a neon-drenched sanctuary for exiles, artists, and dreamers. It was a place suspended between two worlds, caught in a twilight zone. And suddenly, there was this strange, exciting atmosphere when the city decided to rewrite its own history overnight. The Wall came down in November 1989 and I witnessed that historical event. East German citizens flooded into West-Berlin and for a while the city became the beating, restless heart of Europe.

Despite its reinvention, Berlin remained a lifelong friend. The photographs I took during my visits were never intended as art. They were merely testimonies, hurried fragments of ordinary hours and untethered moments, captured without a single thought for their shelf life or commercial importance. Only now, decades later, they are still the quiet, grainy witnesses to a fractured city, and an era that has irrevocably slipped through our fingers.