Opening September 6 at Fotografiska Berlin, für uns is more than an exhibition it’s a whispered thank you to the late Helga Paris. Known for her unwavering empathy and unflinching lens, Paris spent five decades capturing everyday lives with grace and stillness. Now, in the first major showcase since her passing in 2024, Berlin reflects that gaze back.
Curated by Marina Paulenka and Udo Kittelmann, the exhibition gathers together Paris’s most intimate portraits: factory women in East Berlin, teenagers caught in post-Wall transition, poets and painters in smoky bars. But these aren’t relics of a lost GDR. They’re acts of seeing. Of being seen.
A Lens That Refused to Look Down
Paris never imposed. She waited. Her camera hovered like breath present but unobtrusive. Whether documenting her own ageing in fragile self-portraits or filming masked friends in surreal disguise, her work carries a haunting honesty. The series Erinnerungen an Z. folds childhood memory into photo and text like a pocketed love note.
The exhibition includes beloved works like Treff-Modelle, Hellersdorf, Berliner Jugendliche, and Mein Alex, but it’s the mood that lingers one of quiet defiance, connection, and deep care. The title für uns borrows from GDR poet Bert Papenfuß, echoing the truth Helga knew deeply: survival is something we do together.
With a companion book published by Kehrer Verlag, featuring her own typewritten texts, für uns invites us to slow down. To stay in the room. To look again. Because Helga always did.
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