1991-1995 Berlin - Die Frühen Neunziger – documentary photography: photo series and photo story, photos by Andreas Muhs

Berlin - Die Frühen Neunziger, Berlin, 1989-1995, 221 photos, analogue

After moving to Berlin in 1991 to take up the position of assistant to the management at PPS, a journey into a completely new, old world began for me. No sooner had I arrived in the eastern part of the city than there wasn't a single free day when I wasn't out with my camera. With my pictures, I went to the newspaper "Scheinschlag", which reported with great commitment on the post-reunification period in the eastern part of the city, using large-format photos and an exciting layout. The first publications of my pictures in this newspaper strengthened my desire to work as a freelance photographer. On countless explorations, I looked at the old building quarters in Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. The unrestored and partly dilapidated buildings conveyed an immediate impression of a time that had long ceased to exist in the West. Bullet holes on the house walls testified to the house-to-house fighting in the last days of the war, while open spaces and undeveloped plots were the consequences of a larger calibre. With the start of the first renovations and new constructions, it quickly became clear to me that the cityscape would change rapidly. That is why this series ends in 1995, the start of the first major construction projects on Friedrichstraße. It would be a whole decade before I wanted to compile the pictures into a series. Measured against the presence of the early nineties in Berlin, the adequate pictures had probably not yet been published. Ulrich Gutmair confirmed this retrospectively in the book "Die ersten Tage von Berlin. Der Sound der Wende" published in 2013. For the series "Die Frühen Neunziger", I had to review all the films again and was astonished at how sparingly I had tried to capture each motif with just one exposure. For the selection of the photos, I discovered the print-on-demand provider Blurb. With their help, I was finally able to realise the project as a photo book of astonishing quality. I walked around the Leipzig Book Fair with this dummy until I was finally able to convince a publisher. This led to the creation of the book "Berlin – Die frühen Neunziger" by Lehmstedt Verlag in 2010, which is now out of print.

Leica M6