Over fourteen years, between 1977 and 1990, Gundula Schulze Eldowy roamed here and there through the old parts of East Berlin, recording with her camera the scars that the war had left behind on the city and its inhabitants, and conserving in her pictures the last traces of the waning “milieu” so typical of old Berlin. Her picture cycles leave no one cold. They evoke enthusiasm or agitation. The artist moved in a milieu whose very existence tended to be denied, and did not look away when confronted with poverty, misery, despair and loneliness. Yet when she broke taboos, it was never an end in itself, but aimed, on the contrary, at gaining access to human tragedies. Her evocative pictures have travelled the world over in the past twenty years; now for the first time they are collected in an opulent volume of photos. The cycles “Berlin on a dog’s night”, “The wind fills itself with water”, “Nude portraits”, “Work”, “Street picture” and “Tamerlan” are shown here in context for the first time.
