Stefan Koppelkamm’s Local Time

While travelling through East Germany in 1990 – after the fall of the Berlin wall but before re-unification – Stefan Koppelkamm felt the urge to capture in photographs a reality which he assumed would soon disappear for ever. Ten or twelve years later, the photographer sought out each location again and took a second photograph from exactly the same standpoint. The pairs of photographs which were created in this way tell about the deep-seated changes which had occurred in many of these places over the intervening years. Koppelkamm says that this project started out as pure curiosity. “Pure curiosity was my initial motivation. I had already been to the GDR from West Berlin a number of times, I knew Eastern Germany a little, but there were still so many blind spots on my map and names that were only legends to me. When the Wall came down, I lit out eagerly for Dresden, Leipzig, G