The title of Helga Paris’s *für uns* means “for us,” and that small phrase sets the terms of the book. Paris (1938–2024) photographed the city she lived in for five decades, and the work assembled here runs from the 1960s through the years around German reunification. It is not a survey of extremes. It is a record of shared conditions, made by someone who counted herself part of what she photographed.
Paris worked almost entirely in black and white, turning her camera on streets, houses, factory floors, and above all on people. Her portraits of everyday life in the GDR carry an unusual combination of steadiness and tact: close enough to register fatigue, stubbornness, or amusement, never so close that the sitter is exposed. Long associated with East Berlin, she has been described as one of the most significant photographic voices to emerge from the GDR — a claim the images themselves support, since her subject is rarely the state and always the person standing inside it.
Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2025 as a 239-page hardcover, *für uns* accompanies the exhibition of the same name and is the fullest presentation of her work yet assembled. Crucially, it does not limit itself to the celebrated series. Lesser-known bodies of work and personal snapshots are threaded through the sequence, and those informal pictures change how the familiar ones read: you begin to see the decisions behind them, the repetitions, the returning attention to particular faces and rooms. Udo Kittelmann and Marina Paulenke appear among the volume’s credited contributors; the photographs throughout are Paris’s.
For a collector, the case rests on something plainer than scarcity. This is a single-artist book spanning an entire working life, published in connection with a major exhibition and completed after the photographer’s death in 2024, which makes it the most convenient place to study a career that unfolded largely in one city under two very different political orders. Read in sequence, from the early 1960s forward, it also documents changes in the fabric of Berlin itself — façades, workplaces, interiors — without ever treating architecture as the point. Documentary photography from the former East Germany continues to be reassessed; Paris belongs in that conversation, and this volume gives her the room to be read at length rather than in excerpts.
