Street with Two Cars, Potsdam, East Germany, July 1990
Reinterpreted, February, 2005
I visited the Berlin/Potsdam area in early July of 1990. The Wall had been breached the previous October and the two Germanys were still in the middle of a complicated reunification process. On the day we arrived, East Germany officially began using the West German mark as their currency. This made purchasing things much easier and there were also no border controls. But technically, it was still East Germany.
Potsdam is a city on the outskirts of Berlin, famous for Sans Souci, the 18th century palace of Frederick the Great, as well as the location for the Potsdam Conference, where the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union met in July 1945 after Germany's defeat to carve up Europe into the spheres of influence that would become the foundations for the Cold War. When we first visited, it was clear that 45 years of Communist rule and neglect had taken their toll and many of the streets looked like this one, with dilapidated, falling apart houses and buildings that looked like they hadn't seen any maintainence or a fresh coat of paint since the end of Worl War II. It was a strange, sad, almost abandoned atmosphere with traces of a former glory peeking through a patina of beautiful decay. When I returned four years later in 1994, things had been cleaned up quite a bit and the place was looking much more respectable.
This image is part of a series of Revisitations or Reinterpretations of older images. In them I use the source material of the original image (in this case a 35mm slide) and reinterpret the scene. In this image, the new interpretatation includes color and tonal modifications, color tinting, focus changes and the addition of the scuffed and scratched texture, which I felt went very well with the scuffed, scratched and abused look of Potsdam itself in 1990. As with the Prague images I have posted recently, the ressurection of this image was initiated by a request from a photo editor for possible images to illustrate a short story set in Eastern Europe.