CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/12/2022

Timely and enigmatic, 'Helga Paris: Women at Work' is a New Release this week

Featured spreads are from Helga Paris: Women at Work, releasing this week from Weiss Publications. Collecting a tight selection of 49 out of more than 1,500 portraits of female workers at a state-owned East Berlin clothing factory in 1984, this volume gives readers a straightforward yet still enigmatic picture of what things were really like at that place, at that time. “I’ve always been drawn to the everyday, the unspectacular,” Paris writes. “But I didn’t photograph it clinically, aseptically; rather, I tried to reproduce it as realistically and as hauntingly as possible. This means that when I photographed women in factories or people on the street, I had to create a certain level of trust in a very short amount of time, to bring the people to a state of inner peace, where they could meet my gaze with a certain degree of self-confidence. In this peace, every face is an experience; in particular, the rather unremarkable, unattractive ones gain an unforeseen beauty.… My subjects are people. The need to document everyday life in photographs developed out of necessity. In East Germany, only favorable photographs were shown in the papers and to the public—ideally of the happiest people possible. Real life was hardly ever documented.”