Helga Paris (1938 – 2024) may not be a well-known name in Bulgaria, yet her work established her as a prominent figure in German photography. Through individual images and photographic series, she created a unique palette of everyday life in East Germany between the late 1960’s and the 1990‘s. Everytning about her photographs seems to come alive, to be breathing and have a palpable presence and this does not go only for people and animals, but also for houses, streets, landscapes and objects.

Helga Paris had a talent for spotting and revealing vulnerabilities and insecurities, while wrapping them at the same time in delicateness. The self-taught photographer’s view was shaped and influenced by the paintings of Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon, as well as by postwar Italian and French cinema, theater and literature and she would stick to it regardless of whether she was taking photographs around East Berlin’s working class quarter of Prenzlauer Berg or the industrial city of Halle, or she was travelling around Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Poland and Italy. Growing up in World War II and the postwar years of recovery and hope may have contributed to the special poetic quality of the photographer’s visual world.

Helga Paris was born in Gollnow, Pomerania, in 1938. She studied fashion design before she took up photography as an autodidact in 1964. Her style is characterized by lyricism that defies interpretation or ideologizing.

The photographer was interested in everyday, sometimes fairly mundane moments of interaction, namely relations, glances, gestures, movements, superficial structures and spaces revealing the circumstances, stories and experiences of people and objects, as well as the ways to deal with these circumstances.

During her travels to Transylvania (then People’s Republic of Romania), Georgia (then part of the USSR), Volgograd (Russia) and New York (USA), Helga Paris shortened the distance between herself and the locals in the same unbiased manner she communicated with her neighbours back home, the young people of Berlin, the women workers at the textile factory or the houses and individuals in the industrial city of Halle in central Germany.

The exhibition, featuring around 130 black and white photographs accompanied by brief notes and a film by Helke Misselwitz, invites viewers to a trip back in time, thus making them aware of the fleetingness of the present.

Excluding a few commissions, Helga Paris worked solely on her own initiative. There was no demand for photographs like hers in the German Democratic Republic. Yet her work gained popularity even before the Unification of Germany. Helga Paris was a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and winner of the Hannah-Höch-Preis.

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Helga Paris – Photography is an ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) exhibition presented at the Sofia City Art Gallery in partnership with Goethe-Institut Bulgaria. Logistics partner of the event: Cargo Planet.

Concept and selection: Inka Schube, curator, in cooperation with Helga Paris