Manfred Paul: Paris 1988

In 1988 Manfred Paul was invited to go on a six-week trip to study in Paris. At the time, this was a rare opportunity for a photographer from East Germany to explore a country on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He managed to borrow a Leica M3 from one of the staff at the French Cultural Centre in Berlin; looking through the viewfinder of this camera gave him a special experience of Paris, which changed his way of seeing and had a lasting effect on his photography. The sixtyfive pictures comprising Paris 1988 are not concerned with the tourist version of Paris, nor are they a social documentary exploration: rather, they are a rehearsal for a postmodernist visual practice. Paul sets up an opposition between the fragment and the long shot; instead of watching out for the decisive moment, he is interested in the peripheral aspects of an event. Surfaces, shop windows, the everyday tokens and material qualities of city lifeimpressions that no longer piece themselves together into a complete image, but which convey the atmosphere of the time: Lair de Paris. Manfred Paul has lived and worked in East Berlin since 1968. He was one of the most important exponents of auteur photography in the GDR.