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Helga Paris (née Steffens; 21 May 1938 – 5 February 2024) was a German photographer, known for her photographs of daily life in East Germany. She photographed theatre, and then turned to a series of people and streetscapes, such as Garbage Collectors (1974), Berliner Kneipen (1975), Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (1981), self portraits, and houses and faces from Halle for an exhibition that was cancelled in 1986. Her works, shown internationally, received recognition especially after German reunification as documents of a past.
In Zossen, she completed school successfully with the Abitur in 1956. She then studied fashion design at the School of Engineering for the Clothing Industry ( Ingenieurschule für Bekleidungsindustrie) in Berlin until 1960. She undertook an internship at . She then worked briefly as a lecturer of costume studies at a trade school, and worked as a commercial graphic designer for the advertisement agency in Berlin. She was a costume designer at the Berliner Studenten- und Arbeitertheater, a theatre of students and workers, which introduced her to the artists' circle around Wolf Biermann. In 1960, she started to take photographs with a 6×6 Flexaret camera.
During this time she met the painter Ronald Paris; they were married from 1961 to 1974. Through her husband, she was able to establish contacts in the East German art scene of the time. She had developed a passion for photography but, like many of the leading photographers of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was often described as self-taught. She believed that much of her photographic passion and skill were acquired from two aunts who were enthusiastic photographers, constantly taking pictures from the 1940s through the 1960s, which Paris carefully preserved in a collection of show boxes adapted for the purpose.
In 1975, she photographed scenes from theatre productions by Benno Besson at the Berlin Volksbühne and by Alexander Lang and at the Deutsches Theater. She presented her first personal exhibition in 1978 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
Her work was focused increasingly on people and streetscapes, initially in Berlin where many of her subjects were neighbours and friends. She documented social conditions in several series: Müllfahrer (Garbage collectors, 1974), Berliner Kneipen (Berlin bars, 1975), Möbelträger (Movers, 1975), Altersheim (Senior citizens' home, 1980), Berliner Jugendliche (Berlin youths) and Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (Leipzig main station, both 1981/82). She took photographs of Zossen where she had grown up, titled Erinnerungwn an Z. (Memories of Z.), self portraits from 1981, in 1984 portraits of women working at VEB Treffmodelle, She photographed people in Soviet Georgia, Poland and Transylvania, for example young men around the Rome main station. She photographed houses and faces from Halle from 1983 to 1985, with the approach to document everything like a foreign town in a foreign country ( wie eine fremde Stadt in einem fremden Land). In Halle, she encountered greater difficulty than in Berlin because the people she photographed were strangers who sometimes reacted with hostility. She then took time to talk to people and ask before photographing them, making them more open to being photographed but still reluctantly, when the streets in the background showed that the city centre looked badly damaged because it was undergoing major and slow redevelopment. Her 1986 exhibition Houses and Faces. Halle 1983–1985, planned for the city's gallery, was cancelled a few days before the scheduled opening because her pictures gave publicity to the city's misguided building policy. By the time it was cancelled, a catalogue and exhibition labels for the photographs had already been printed.
Her career as a free-lance photographer survived German reunification, and for some commentators her photographs from the East German period gained a wider interest once the period they depicted had become history. In 2003, her twelve-part exhibition Self images 1981–1988 in the context of the Art in the German Democratic Republic exhibition drew much interest. From 1996, Paris was a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. She left her archive of around 230,000 negatives and 6,300 films to the institution.
Paris died at her Berlin apartment on 5 February 2024, at the age of 85.
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