Berlin East-West 1997–98

I began photographing the former border between East and West Berlin in the summer of 1997. My initial intention was to look at how urban planning was transforming a landscape that, only a few years earlier, had been organised around a political and physical division. I was interested in the areas where the Wall had disappeared but where its former presence could still be sensed through empty plots, interrupted streets, exposed façades, provisional architecture and stretches of land that seemed to belong neither fully to one side nor the other.

At first, I approached these places almost as a documentary photographer. I wanted to understand how Berlin was dealing with the disappearance of a border that had structured everyday life for decades. Yet while photographing, I became increasingly aware that my attraction to these spaces was not primarily historical or architectural. I was responding to something more familiar.

The grey buildings, courtyards, neglected backyards and open spaces began to evoke the environment of my childhood in Chișinău, Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union. I was born there in 1965 and lived there until 1973, when my family immigrated to Israel. By the time I started working in Berlin, almost all concrete memories of those early years had become inaccessible to me. I had the unsettling feeling that I could no longer remember the place itself: I could not reconstruct the neighbourhood, the streets, or the everyday surroundings in which those memories had taken shape.

This recognition changed the project. What had begun as an investigation of Berlin's post-Wall landscape gradually became connected to my own experience of displacement. The former border areas seemed to provide a physical structure for something I could not locate directly in memory. I found myself returning to backyards, passages, fences, blank walls and peripheral spaces—not because they resembled Chișinău in any exact documentary sense, but because they generated a feeling of recognition without certainty.

I continued photographing even after understanding that I would not find my childhood environment there. The search itself became important. There was a contradiction between the precision of the camera and the instability of what I was trying to remember. Photography could describe a façade, a courtyard or an empty plot in great detail, but it could not verify the memory that had led me there. The images therefore began to occupy a space between documentation and projection.

The disappearance of the Berlin Wall also became significant in another way. A political border can be removed physically while continuing to structure how a place is perceived. In my photographs, I was interested in places where the former division remained present indirectly—in the organisation of space, in gaps between buildings, in neglected areas, or simply in the expectation that something should still be there.

This corresponded closely to my own relationship to memory after immigration. The rupture between Moldova and Israel was not something I experienced only as a change of geography. It also produced a division between what had happened and what remained available to memory. I understood that I was photographing Berlin partly through that personal history.

The backyards in the series therefore function neither as evidence of East Berlin nor as substitutes for Chișinău. They are places where two histories briefly overlap: the history of a divided European city and the private history of a childhood that had become difficult to access. The photographs do not resolve that relationship. Instead, they register the attempt to approach it.

Looking back, Berlin East-West became important for my later work because it was one of the first projects in which architecture and urban space ceased to be simply subjects of photography. They became structures through which questions of migration, memory, political history and belonging could be examined. The camera records what is physically present, but the project is equally concerned with what remains absent: a wall that has disappeared, a childhood neighbourhood that cannot be recovered, and the persistent desire to give these absences a visible form.