Anne Schönharting’s Habitat Berlin-Charlottenburg documents a long-term photographic project in one of Berlin’s more traditional districts. Schönharting began photographing the residents of Charlottenburg in their own apartments in 2012, and continued for more than ten years. The people portrayed evidently appreciated her quiet but determined working method and recommended her to others. The book brings together women and men, couples, families, students, and children, each shown in their own distinctive style. At times the camera rests instead on an empty room, a window, or a door—images that speak of the people who usually live there but are absent at the moment.
Inka Schube is the author of the accompanying text, which responds to these moods and places them in a literary context. Schönharting photographs the people opposite her without prejudice, at a natural distance and at eye level. The large-format book was designed by Stefan Stefanescu, and its appearance deliberately recalls book design in Berlin in the 1920s. Hartmann Books published it in 2022: 160 pages, 85 illustrations, German and English texts, halflinen binding, embossed, 27.5 × 35.5 cm. The publisher notes that a limited edition is available, and that the book received the German Photobook Award 2023, Bronze Medal.
The photographic project is a sustained portrait of a single neighborhood, made over more than a decade. Its 1920s-inflected design connects it to an earlier moment in Berlin photography and publishing, while Schube’s writing gives the sequence a reflective dimension. The book’s focus remains the residents of Charlottenburg and the apartments in which they live, observed over time rather than through any single encounter.
