Helga Paris (1938–2024) was born in Gollnow, Pomerania. She studied fashion design before she took up photography as an autodidact in 1964. Her style is characterized by lyricism that defies interpretation or ideologizing.

The photographer was interested in everyday, sometimes fairly mundane moments of interaction, namely relations, glances, gestures, movements, superficial structures and spaces revealing the circumstances, stories and experiences of people and objects, as well as the ways to deal with these circumstances.

During her travels to Transylvania (then People’s Republic of Romania), Georgia (then part of the USSR), Volgograd (Russia) and New York (USA), Helga Paris shortened the distance between herself and the locals in the same unbiased manner she communicated with her neighbours back home, the young people of Berlin, the women workers at the textile factory or the houses and individuals in the industrial city of Halle in central Germany.

Helga Paris had a talent for spotting and revealing vulnerabilities and insecurities, while wrapping them at the same time in delicateness. The self-taught photographer’s view was shaped and influenced by the paintings of Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon, as well as by postwar Italian and French cinema, theater and literature and she would stick to it regardless of whether she was taking photographs around East Berlin’s working class quarter of Prenzlauer Berg or the industrial city of Halle, or she was travelling around Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Poland and Italy. Growing up in World War II and the postwar years of recovery and hope may have contributed to the special poetic quality of the photographer’s visual world.

[Sofia City Art Gallery]