PHOTO SERIES GROUP 3:
PLACES

Introduction

Usually I sort photo series very deliberately. They are put into their respective categories and threads. If it's city sights and buildings, it's in Places. If it's façades, it's in Façades and maybe in the Pittoresque thread. If it's people, it's in Faces and probably in the Dwellers thread.

For the new Berlin material, I chose to have several sub-series like that, a new Dwellers, Pittoresque, etc. Yet I had too much material, two days, one was to be split up like mentioned before, yet the other day was approx. 100 pictures already after the first cut. I could have split it up as well, and it would have spawned further Dwellers, Wayfarers, Pittoresques and whatnots. This would have been difficult.

In the choice to have all the pictures from that one day in one series, and calling it Berlin, Series 2, I made a deliberate decision to deviate from the Places format: almost no sights, mostly people, no sorting. I keep the original "sorting" that is done by my simply walking through the city. Transitions are made clear by photographs of public transportation (bus and subway), so it is possible to follow my directions. I let the city tell the story, and I let it be told through the people in it - by not dividing dwellers (natives) and wayfarers (tourists), I am diffusing that oftentimes already very blurred line, as I sometimes subsume the wayfares into the dwellers.

A city is a Vast area centered in one place, moving through time. People in the city are people in the city, no matter why, where from, where to. They move in the streets, sometimes are seen behind windows, and their interaction with the city makes it as much unique as do the landmarks that usually define a city.

To complicate matters further, the pictures are taken throughout the Soccer World Cup 2006. Berlin was peopled by great numbers of travelers, so the diversity that can be inferred from the pictures is mostly due to that event - but it is also inherent in the metropolis itself. Berlin at that time represented the world, but this time in a peaceful way.