Hufelandstraße, 1055 Berlin

Zimmermann, Harf
Harf Zimmermann was born in 1955 in Dresden, and in 1961 moved to Berlin where he today lives and works. After initially training as a journalist, Zimmermann studied photography under Arno Fischer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. He was a founding member of the photographic agency Ostkreuz, and today contributes to a range of international magazines. Steidl has published Zimmermann's BRAND WAND (2015).

Hufelandstrasse, 1055 Berlin is Harf Zimmermann's 1986-87 portrait of the people and places of Hufelandstrasse, a bustling neighborhood street in the heart of communist East Germany. Inspired by Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street (1970), his radical depiction of life on a block in East Harlem, Zimmermann set about documenting Hufelandstrasse where he also lived at the time.

For over a year, Zimmermann photographed almost daily on the street with his large-format camera, patiently asking shop-owners and residents if he could take their picture. Hufelandstrasse was then home to a cross-section of citizens of the German Democratic Republic, as well as many family-run stores and workshops-from bakeries and cobblers, to a pet shop and even an atelier for repairing women's stockings-an uncanny concentration of private business which had otherwise been fazed out by the communist state.

This book comprises black-and-white outdoor photos of buildings and groups of people, as well as a number of more intimate color images of families in their apartments. Hufelandstrasse, 1055 Berlin is an historical document beyond nostalgia of life under a regime in agony.