Helga Paris, born in 1938, occupies an significant position in German photography. In her work, she approaches the people she portrays with personal interest and compassion. The resulting pictures transcend the bounds of a 'social study.' Paris brings forth the subject's personality in each portrait and thus reveals the human uniqueness of these individuals behind their social and public roles.

Paris, who has lived in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg since 1966, is the chronicler of the long East German post-war period. For more than four decades, she trained her keen and compassionate eye on the people that experienced this era. This show includes the melancholic vitality of East Berlin corner bars and the dilapidation of old Berlin streets in the 1970s. We encounter trash collectors, rebelliously angry and "cool" young adults, and proud women textile workers. We travel to Poland, Georgia, and Transylvania and wander through the central German industrial city of Halle, a Diva in Grau (Diva in Gray).

After the fall of the Berlin wall, she embarked on an in-depth analysis of her own early wartime and postwar experiences. Groups of works on this theme are also on show.

With a few exceptions, Helga Paris worked entirely without commissions. Even though there was no market for pictures of this kind in East Germany, her work was already extremely popular before German reunification.

While making an extraordinary contribution to European photography, she and her contemporaries were almost unknown in Britain. This is the only UK showing of this major retrospective.