Helga Paris's Halle Photo Series Revisited: Ruin and Pride in the GDR

Helga Paris's photographic series 'Häuser und Gesichter' (Houses and Faces), shot in Halle an der Saale in the early 1980s, is the subject of a current exhibition. The series documents the coexistence of architectural decay and civic pride. Forty years after being banned in East Germany, the work remains compelling. The mild light of historical distance has obscured the extent of building dilapidation in most GDR cities. Even contemporaries struggle to recall how deeply the melancholy of decline and stagnation shaped urban life. Halle serves as a poignant example, ironically because it was the only major German city not heavily destroyed in World War II, preserving extensive historic building stock that subsequently fell into disrepair.