2021-2023 Berlin-City-Tour – documentary photography: photo series and photo story, photos by Andreas Muhs

Berlin-City-Tour, Berlin, 2021-2023, 152 photos, analogue

"Berlin-City-Tour" is another attempt to comprehensively portray Berlin in a photo book. Over the years, I have built a collection of about 300 Berlin photo books, ranging from the early days around 1900 to the present. This series was intended to be another contribution to this collection. The selection of photographed locations is based exclusively on my personal impressions and memories and deviates significantly from the commonly chosen motifs. My city tour thus begins under the dark pedestrian bridge at Friedrichstraße station and then moves spirally into the outer districts. The title image alone shows the special character of Berlin. Because I didn't have a tripod with me, I had to place the camera on the railing. I actually wanted to include this railing in the photo. Therefore, I repeated the shot a few months later with a tripod. By that time, however, the sign with the series title had already been removed. For the series, I used the Hasselblad 903, a camera with a fixed wide-angle lens and a diagonal field of view of 90°. The extreme wide-angle perspective only appears harmonious in the square image format. With the rediscovery of analogue photography for my personal work, my interest in photo books simultaneously comes to an end. For decades, I acquired photo books at flea markets, in antiquarian shops, and later online. This resulted in a collection of 1,000 photo books. This includes both unexpected discoveries and classics by renowned photographers whose work I wanted to understand. There are some copies that I look at again and again. Yet, in every book, I was able to discover something new for my own photography. My apprenticeship now seems to be over.

Hasselblad 903