Wandelism: old garage turned into street art exhibition

Remember The Haus? Well this year it's not a house, it's a garage and it's about to be torn down. For two weeks only (initially one week), an old car repair garage has been taken over by 90 local and international street artists and transformed into an urban art gallery. 

The title of the exhibition, Wandelism, is a play on the words Wandel (which means change in German) and vandalism. The aim is to show that Berlin is still colourful and wild. In a city that is slowly becoming too expensive for artists, Berlin's artists need to find their own spaces. 

Spread over 2000 square metres, 15 rooms, 2 halls and a basement, the art-work is certainly very colourful and varied. Just don't forget to look inside the toilets!

A feast for the eyes: if you enjoy photography head for City West

Helmut Newton Foundation

For many tourists and Berliners alike, the area next to Zoo Station is most readily associated with the eponymous zoo, the aquarium, the Bikini shopping mall and the Gedächtniskirche (or Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church if you prefer). However, over the past three years this has become Berlin’s temple of photography. In 2014, the C/O Berlin gallery moved from its location in Mitte to Amerika Haus, on Hardenbergstraße, just around the corner from Jebensstraße, the location of the Museum of Photography. The latter houses the Kunstbibliothek’s Collection of Photography and the Helmut Newton Foundation. In December, these venues opened their doors to two exhibitions showcasing vintage prints from the pre-digital and pre-Photoshop era of the 1960s and 1970s. While Joel Meyerowitz was a pioneer of colour photography, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton broke the conventions of fashion photography.

Fashion Revolution

The exhibition showcased by the Helmut Newton Foundation is called Guy Bourdin. Image Maker / Helmut Newton. A Gun For Hire / Angelo Marino. Another Story. For the first time ever, the iconic images of the two revolutionary fashion photographers, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, are presented side by side. Bourdin and Newton were the star photographers of French Vogue and worked for the most prestigious fashion houses. With their provocative and ironic images, they transformed fashion photography in the 1960s and 1970s. In the words of Shelly Verthime, curator of the Guy Bourdin Estate: “For the first time it was about the image – it was beyond the fashion”. The advertising images for Charles Jourdan shoes are particularly intriguing. Finally, the snap-shot images recently taken by Newton’s former assistant, Angelo Marino on an iPhone, should be seen as complementary to the exhibition and present a view on contemporary photography. 

Colour revolution

Joel Meyerowitz

The exhibition featured by C/O Berlin from December 2017 until March 2018 was dedicated to legendary street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. In the 1960s, when artistic photography was exclusively conceived in black and white, Meyerowitz was one of the first photographers to recognise the power of colour. At the press tour of the Joel Meyerowitz . Why Color? Retrospective, the photographer explained: “Colour added content and a richness of detail to an image that could not be found in a black and white photograph”. The C/O exhibition is focussed primarily on the vintage prints in black and white and colour from the 1960s and 1970s, leading up to the present day. Starting from scenes of New York street life, the exhibition included pictures from the European car journey, which Meyerowitz defines as the time he “came of age” and the Cape Cod studies on light. As the only photographer to be granted access to Ground Zero, the pictures of the aftermath of 9/11 are particularly striking. The exhibition ends with a series of portraits and Still Lifes, Meyerowitz’s latest endeavour. In case you missed the Berlin retrospective, the autobiographical photography book Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself has just been released.