BERLIN George Hashiguchi

*Available only in Europe

*This book is secondhand.

A photobook Hashiguchi made over some three months in 1990-91, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of the former East Berlin; first published by Ota Shuppan in 1992. Spared the fires of two world wars, the district's old buildings were left to decay, and Hashiguchi captured them in monochrome with an old Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex acquired on site, recording the crumbling streetscape and the people who went on living there with raw immediacy. As a record of East Berlin at the moment when the disappearance of the Wall laid bare the strata of history, it carries real value as testimony to its era. Natsuki Ikezawa contributes a preface and Tadashi Hirai a commentary. Forming a pair with Isn't It Nice to Be Here, which photographed West Berlin, it is a book that might be called the other culmination of the long attention Hashiguchi gave to a city standing between division and reunification.