Photography is a powerful communication tool. It allows us to visualize a city or region. In the 1920s, a type of work emerged dedicated to regions (countries, regions, or cities), combining text and photographs. The book " Berlin in Bildern by Adolf Behne and Sasha Stone is a prime example. The photographs in the book show old and new Berlin in equal measure, which was certainly not an architectural reality in 1929. Sasha uses both classic photographs and images shot according to the rules of New Photography. His photographs of Berlin—some published in the book "Berlin in Bildern" and others not—sometimes reveal a desire, influenced by the politics of the Weimar Republic (the German political regime of the time), to portray Berlin as a modern metropolis like Paris or, better yet, New York. The emphasis is on the verticality of the buildings through the use of a frog perspective, on "city traffic," which at the time was seen as a sign of urban modernity, on electricity with photographs of the Klingenberg power plant, and on the construction of the metro, a symbol of progress. A photograph like that of the metro construction site at Alexanderplatz serves as a pretext here to evoke modernity while simultaneously documenting urban transformation.
Photo gallery
