An appreciation of Helga Paris’s photography reached a wider audience than ever before with a 2019 major retrospective in Berlin, the city where she lived and worked. An exhibition at Kicken Berlin at the end of the following year confirmed the realization that Helga Paris’s work was of considerable and intrinsic interest. Now, two books of her portrait photography in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) make clear that the enduring quality of her achievement goes beyond the merely documentary.
The workplace in Women At Work is a textile factory that Paris first became acquainted with during an internship there as part of her fashion design studies in Berlin. Returning there as a photographer (some of the women knew her from her internship), she was able to establish a rapport with the women in ways that bring to mind Tom Wood’s amity with the people of Merseyside. The ability of both photographers to engage empathically with their subject matter accounts for the quality of their work.
