Helga Paris

An exhibition of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V., Stuttgart www.ifa.de

as part of its photography series, the Leonhardi-Museum Dresden presented the touring exhibition "Helga Paris. Photography", which was curated by Inka Schube, curator of photography at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, for the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). The station in Dresden was organised by Bernd Heise, director of the Leonhardi Museum Dresden, together with the independent art historian Franziska Schmidt. The exhibition has been shown at a total of 21 venues worldwide over the past 9 years.

As one of the most important contemporary photographers of her generation, Helga Paris played a prominent role in German photography. Her subtle interior views, especially of everyday life in socialist Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe, made her an important chronicler of the times. As a photographer, Paris devoted herself to very different subjects with a particular preference for portrait photography.

AI generated: The image shows a young girl standing on a street and smiling directly into the camera. There are other people in the background, including a child running and a group of people in front of a building.

From "Transylvania", 1980, 38.5 × 24 cm, gelatin silver print | © Helga Paris

Helga Paris, born in Gollnow in 1938, studied fashion design before she began to explore the medium of photography as a self-taught photographer in 1964. Trained by modernist painting, early Soviet, Italian and French cinema, theatre and poetry, the self-taught photographer developed an extensive oeuvre in tenderly nuanced black and white over the course of four and a half decades.
In Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, where Paris has lived since 1966, she took her first pictures of people in her neighbourhood. She found her motifs in flats, pubs, break rooms and factory halls, on streets and at railway stations.
At the beginning of 1980, she took photographs on a trip to Transylvania, followed by further trips to Georgia, Volgograd, New York, Rome and Poland until 1997. In the 1980s, she produced series of textile workers, young people from Berlin and her self-portraits. She created a photographic monument to the central German industrial city of Halle/Saale with "Houses and Faces". It was not until 1991 that her unpretentious view of the city and its inhabitants was published by Mitteldeutscher Verlag under the title "Diva in Grau". The two film-like photo essays "Memories of Z." and "Friedrichshain" in the early 1990s also delve into German history in search of her own childhood.
Helga Paris has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 1996, where her negative archive is now located.

Helga Paris' visual world is characterised by a poetic closeness that dispenses with any interpretation or ideologisation. Paris is interested in the everyday, sometimes quite banal moments of being with and with one another: attitudes, looks, gestures, movements, surface structures and spaces that tell of the circumstances, the stories and experiences of people and things as well as of the way in which these circumstances are dealt with. Thanks to his special ability to photograph neglected streets and decaying houses with the same compassionate and tender rigour as the inhabitants living there, the people portrayed are given a special dignity. It is always about the question of how the respective circumstances of history and time inscribe themselves into the most private and everyday life.

The ifa exhibition was complemented by around 30 artist portraits.
A total of around 130 photographs from the period from 1968 to 1997 were shown. A documentary film triptych by director Helke Misselwitz also provided insights into the life and work of Helga Paris.

The following programme awaited you at the opening on 8 October:

Welcome: Bernd Heise
Leonhardi-Museum Dresden

Greeting: Dr Ellen Strittmatter
Head of the Art Department at ifa, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.

Introduction: Inka Schube
Curator of Photography at the Sprengel Museum Hannover

Catalogue

A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.

About ifa
ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) is Germany's oldest intermediary organisation and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017. It is committed to the peaceful and enriching coexistence of people and cultures worldwide. The ifa promotes artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes and acts as a competence centre for foreign
cultural and educational policy. It is globally networked and focusses on long-term, partnership-based cooperation.

The ifa is funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and the state capital Stuttgart. www.ifa.de

Helga Paris

An exhibition of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V., Stuttgart www.ifa.de

Catalogue

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Helga Paris

Location

An exhibition of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V., Stuttgart www.ifa.de

Catalogue

Previous exhibition

Next exhibition