Neighbours (Berlin), 2006
Photography, C-type prints and silver gelatine prints from 5x4 negatives, six diptych, various sizes
Neighbours (Berlin) is based on a series of six postcards from 1905/06, found in a Berlin antiquarian bookshop when I had just moved there in 2005. In the original images, a group of people is depicted standing outside the houses where they live and work. On the back of the postcards the exact addresses are given as well as the date of their production.
Taking those as instructions for a new set of group portraits I revisited the six locations to see how those sites exist today, one hundred years on, to which extent history has altered the infrastructure and architecture of this city.
To make these diptychs, I then invited today’s residents to participate in a new group portrait. The resulting images are a portrait of the changes inscribed in a city, of memory and history as much as of the individuals who have agreed to participate and become part of an image with their neighbours, who most often are strangers to each other as much as they are to me. The process of photography here is therefore used to create the potential for relation, for new exchanges to take place beyond the process of an image being made.
The work is presented as diptychs of the original postcard and the new photographs.