Frank Thiel's city portrait focuses on the Berlin of scaffolding and tower cranes, rather than the traditional view of a new city emerging from the ruins of a political no-man's land.
Having grown up in the GDR, Thiel gained a first-hand view of Berlin's skewed urbanism when his family was 'repatriated' to West Germany in the mid 1980s. Just a few years later the Wall came down, and the young photography student found himself at the epicentre of ultra-rapid change.
A Berlin Decade documents this upheaval, viewed through Thiel’s informed eyes. As a new city emerges from the demolition of the worst excesses of socialist modernism, Thiel’s unflinching camera questions the Utopian premises of the new architecture, and the rapid erosion of the political patina that characterised the once-divided city.
INFORMATION
Frank Thiel: A Berlin Decade 1985-1995 (Hatjze Kantz, £39.99)
