Dream On – Berlin, the '90s edited by Boaz Levin for the C/O Berlin Foundation in collaboration with Annette Hauschild and Kathrin Kohle, Agentur Ostkreuz, Spector Books, 2024, 343 p.

Abstract

Accompanying an exhibition, featured at the C/O Berlin from 14 September 2024 to 22 January 2025, this catalogue traces the radical transformation of Berlin in the 1990s, in the newly unified Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a sense, the catalogue and the exhibition that it tends to complement serves as a guide to the city engaged in discussing itself, questioning and rethinking its identity. The exhibition shows the work of the Photo Agency OSTKREUZ, founded by a group of East German photographers who set out to document the changes in the city during that interesting decade. The photography itself qualifies as and has been dubbed social documentary and/or journalistic photography, but the touch of nostalgia in many of the photographs hints at poetry. This is most obvious in Sybille Bergmann’s series Berlin 1990–1996, especially pages 137, 140, 141, 142–143, 145 and 146–147, but also in Maurice Weiss’ Ciel de Plomb (Leaden Sky) – 1994–1996, especially pages 159 and 165. In fact, the “humanist, poetic realism” of the OSTKREUZ group is noted by Boaz Levin in his introductory text, Shot, Counter Shot.