Preface

2012 saw my first visit to Berlin. I would have called myself a ‘street photographer’ in those days. Today I would resist this. Street photography has such a bad press and seems to bring out such extremes of reaction. Some photographers live for it. Many don’t ‘get it’ at all. And people in the streets, particularly women (understandably so under the male gaze), are totally bemused.

And yet it is classical street photography that brought something new into visual art. Landscapes, portraits and interior scenes have well established histories in the media of paintings and drawings. As David Campany points out, street photography brought something new to visual art: the fixing of a specific event or scene in time. What Cartier Bresson called the ‘decisive moment’, a shorthand for a complex concept. Campany is right on this point.

As a nod to Walker Evans, I prefer the description "lyrical documentary" to "street photography" for what I do. I think of my urban photography as a kind of visual anthropology, but one that seeks out visual harmony. I seek a unity in my pictures, but the unity is simply a mental thing. A picture's unity comes from its parts, but the unity itself doesn't live in the parts taken together. It lives somewhere else, in the mind — in a conceptual space. As everything else.

An AI search for “Walker Evans lyrical documentary” returns:

‘ a sub-genre that blends objective, fact-based storytelling with subjective, poetic artistry. Coined by photographer Walker Evans in 1964, it means the camera captures everyday facts through a highly emotional, musical, and intuitive lens, prioritizing unconscious poetry over rigid journalistic reporting.’

But there's a snag. This story has the camera "capturing" facts, and the photographer then adding a poetic gloss on top, through some "intuitive lens", whatever that might be.

I don't think it works like that. Seeing isn't catching facts and dressing them up aesthetically after. The noticing and the fact and the way we have seen the fact are already fused. There is no bare fact sitting underneath, waiting to be found, untouched by the way it's seen. To see a thing at all is already to have shaped it. In my book, and in philosophical parlance, things are conceptual ‘all the way down’.

But this is a bigger argument than I can fit into a blog post. It needs its own space, so, perhaps sometime in the future.

Berlin 2026

Over the 14 years Berlin has changed much. Me too. Perhaps more.

Whereas once I might have favoured the edginess of the walk from Neukölln to Hermanplatz via Sonnenallee, or the Warshauer area at night, these days I’m more comfy around Mitte or Prenzlauerberg or even sleepy Charlottenburg. Of course, ‘street photography’ demands active streets, some sparks. So, I walk until I’m out of my comfort zone. It’s part of the deal. I just make sure I wear humdrum clothes, leave my Leicas behind and hide my phone.

I’m probably getting a bit too old to deal with confrontation, not that I ever sought it. For me edgy areas are now best avoided. I have always been able to look after myself, and I’ve understood how to navigate ‘mean streets’, an understanding that I acquired at a young age on the streets of 1960’s Salvador, Brasil, as the only European boy walking the streets of Rio Vermelho.

But there’s more to this than mere safety.

Isn’t the edginess and ‘alternative culture’ that defined Berlin in the immediate post-wall years, a bit passé?

Whereas I once saw irreligiosity and protest in the street murals and pop-up shacks across Berlin, I now see squalor and dirt masquerading as art.

Neukölln to Hermanplatz. © Tony Cearns 2026

The mess of ‘street art’. Fotografiska, © Tony Cearns, 2026

Berlin is full of this kind of grungy ‘street art’. If I can put it this way, a little goes a long way.

And for me of course, the edginess of Warschauer Strasse, Revaler Strasse and ‘Comer’ (Modersohn Strasse) in Friedrichshain doesn’t lend itself easily to lyrical expression, although it’s not impossible of course. For a great example of dilapidation done in a lyrical way, one need only visit Raymond Depardon’s work on Glasgow.

The Government area

A visit to Berlin never seems complete without a stroll from hauptbahnhof down through the government quarter.

Government car waiting. © Tony Cearns 2026.

and finally from this sequence, a reflected image from a window of the parliament building.

The Runner. Government area. © Tony Cearns 2026.

Moving towards the Humboldt University area and Museum Island, I stop to take a picture of Victoria’s chariot on the Brandenburg Gate. Each time over the years I find something quite different. This time I was blessed by a heavy rain-filled sky.

It’s odd that the horses have no names.

The horses of Victoria’s chariot. © Tony Cearns 2026.

There are plenty of locations in Berlin which I visit to re-acquaint myself with an image that I have studied over many years. This one is a favourite of mine. I came across it in 2012 and is part of the tourist trail along the former wall. It reminds me of a picture by Raymond Depardon in his ‘Glasgow’ book.

As it was raining, I had the scene to myself. The clouds didn’t disappoint.

The wall area near Nordbahn. © Tony Cearns 2026

The weather this year was cool and wet, so a visit to the art galleries enticed. This stage set up of a costumier of the 1920’s was very elegant, but also for me, slightly amusing…

Gemäldegalerie exhibition © Tony Cearns 2026

As part of my annual visit I often search out a theme for future photographic enquiry. Last year I spent a couple of days visiting the vegetable allotments across Berlin, particularly at Templehof and Planterwald.

This year I was drawn to the architecture of Gropiusstadt and Marzahn. I sometimes see the architecture associated with Gropius and that found in Marzahn described as ‘brutalist’. That’s completely incorrect. Brutalism has a specific lineage: coming from the Smithsons' New Brutalism, popularised by Reyner Banham's 1955 essay linking it to béton brut, a way of using raw concrete. Its hallmark is board-marked concrete left unfinished, a sense of the massive, a refusal of lightness or charm. Some people like it. Not sure I do.

Gropius and the East German Marzahn style have very different design logics.

Gropiusstadt belongs to the rationalist functionalist tradition — built around light, air, and standardised dwelling units. Economics drove the high-rises: after 1961 the housing shortage intensified, not helped by the strictures of the Wall, and so density was forced upward.

Marzahn is part of an industrial building system. Marzahn's estates used the GDR's WBS 70 panel system, a more advanced version of earlier panel constructions with larger precast elements allowing more spacious and better-lit apartments. The logic is standardisation and throughput — panels were factory-cast, often painted or coloured, and assembled like a kit of parts; the building was designed around manufacturing tolerances and construction speed.

It has always seemed to me that both styles acted against self-expression. Today, wandering around these estates, one can’t help noticing the effort that people make to lend their standardised homes some point of difference.

On this visit, I thought I would take some dusk and night-time pictures of the area around Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof.

Finally, the random portrait. This couple didn’t really understand why I wanted to take their picture, but acquiesced all the same.

I have many photographs of scenes on the S-Bahn and U-Bahn and the rail stations of Berlin. These places make wonderful backdrops to stories. Another time.

Thank you for looking in.

Auf wiedersehen.

Berlin 2026

Preface

Berlin 2026

The Government area

On colour