Love - Street Art in Berlin - Book (Claudia Herrmann)

Description

Street art accompanies us everywhere we go through the city streets with its screams, its whispers and its messages, always finding us. Street art makes the streets speak, it is the color in the streets, it offers us messages, sometimes coded, sometimes clear. Street art is impulsive, mysterious and risky. Street art is witty, vulgar, provocative and beautiful, like Berlin.

But street art is also the language of migrants, an expression of protest, of the search for home, of frustration and displacement, of arrival or belonging. Berlin is a place of longing for newcomers who bring illusions and dreams with them. People's feelings find their way in many different ways. With my camera, I want to capture the sketches, paintings and graffiti left on house walls, bridges, subways and streets. There are fleeting moments among them, but also those that last for years. There are personal messages of love intended for a specific person, but also those that are for all of us.

I have been photographing the city for years. Eight years ago, on a walk, I found the first motif of the "Love" series: "Love hurts" was written on the wall of a decaying house. It struck me how many of the graffiti, drawings and other artworks in public spaces revolve around the theme of love. The love for man and woman, the wounds it inflicts on us, sex, grief, the love for a homeland, for Berlin. Over the years, several hundred photographs were taken. Many of the motifs have already fallen victim to demolition, renovation or simply the rain, and their beauty and transience are only preserved in these photographs.

The book aims to encourage people to walk through Berlin with open eyes. Industrial sites become event venues, occupied houses become expensive condominiums, and contested projects emerge from the no man's land of the Berlin Wall. The city lives and loves - street art intervenes in these processes. The book invites you on a journey through the center of Berlin." (From the foreword)

Claudia Herrmann has lived in Berlin as a Mexican for ten years. She studied photography in Barcelona and in recent years has focused her work on documenting street art in Berlin. There will also be exhibitions in various locations in Berlin to accompany the book.