He is 13 years old, living in East Berlin, capital of the GDR, when he is given a camera. Growing up in this state, which history erased from the map more than 30 years ago, he not only accepts the absurd from time to time as a given, but is also a completely normal boy, between childhood and adulthood, with curiosity and high spirits and with a great deal of passion: trams.
Almost manic, driven by the collector's ambition to get all car types and numbers in front of his lens, he travels through the entire republic. In the end there are more than 20,000 negatives, provided with (car) number, place and date.
Almost 35 years later, the artist and photographer Andreas Wünschirs looks through the archive of tram photos from his youth and is enchanted. But not because the old passion flares up again, but because he sees the everyday life of a country that no longer exists in the pictures. Dealing with one's own past is not that easy, but it is worth it, because the very personal image in Wünschirs' photographs is increasingly taking a back seat to a narration of everyday GDR history. The presence of the railways, the original trigger for the creation of the images, fades and what is happening around them emerges vividly and gains in importance from today's perspective. These everyday scenes, the numerous small realities on the street and off-road, envelop the viewer in a feeling of life from a bygone era. Suddenly allegories emerge, like the man in the fog, which had previously remained hidden - visual worlds that evoke associations with the past (wasn't an entire country standing in the fog here?), as is only possible in retrospect. Given the appropriate time interval, the artist himself is surprised at the different narrative of his experience and realizes that his truth also has several layers.
Ulrike Gurt, 2022