Berlin 2025

after the lyric photograph ...

2025 was my 12th photo trip to Berlin. Each time I find new parts of the city to walk, averaging about 28,000 steps a day. I think I’m getting to know the city quite well. This time I arrived with a vague project in mind. Actually this year I had two vague projects in mind:

The first was to visit several vegetable allotments and community gardens given my interest in vegetable gardening and small-holdings. For this, I decided to use a medium format camera, 75mm and 50mm lenses and for film: Kodak Portra 400. The results will be the subject of a separate post, once I have developed the 10 rolls of film. Expensive stuff is Portra 400, and, as I have not done much colour film photography, I will be interested to see how it went, if I don’t in the meantime balls up the film development.

Here is a map of the major vegetable allotment sites in Berlin. As you can see, it’s a big thing there.

The second project was a continuation of something that I started in 2023 and continued through 2024 into this year - exploring what Walker Evans meant by ‘lyric documentary’.

By way of background, Walker Evans gave a lecture at Yale University where he talked about ‘lyric documentary’. He considered the term ‘documentary’ ‘inexact’ and ‘vague’, since it seemed to shun any possibility of poetry. Evans found ‘the lyric’ in the drawings of Leonardo, the paintings of Titian and in the photographs of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who could ‘select details – and not just any detail – but the most poetic detail’. This is no small feat because, Evans continues, this can only be achieved ‘unconsciously’.

Now that intrigues me.

One can rely on compositional and lighting ‘principles’ to produce a good photograph, and, assuming the subject is an interesting one, the result might be half decent. But I’ve never looked at a scene and consciously applied much thought, let alone a template for success. I look at something through the view finder, move the camera several times to re-frame the scene, or move myself to re-frame the scene, perhaps change the lens, more often than not decide the picture is not worth taking, but when it ‘feels’ right, when the scene seems to have some kind of unity, I press the shutter release. Unless I get that feeling, I don’t press the shutter.

Of course, I get it wrong much of the time. But that’s how I think I do it. No measuring up, no assessment, no conscious deliberation.

So the project is about a style of picture taking that is based on something that is very hard to define. Composition and tonality play a big part, but there is something else. And that’s what my project-quest is about.

I used to consider myself a ‘street photographer’. But this label comes with a lot of baggage and it also restricts what you look at: evidence of people in an urban environment. That shuts you off from so much more. So, when I wander the streets of a city, I try not to think in terms of photographic genres. For me, more to the point is the feeling I get from a scene.

Let me start with a few photographs from 2023 and 2024:

2023 Berlin © Tony Cearns

Moving to 2025:

2025 Berlin

finally,

So, there you have it. I don’t argue that these photographs are ‘good’. But the underlying scenes did something for me, and that’s hard to put into words.

For those interested in technical details, these photographs are 35mm format, Ilford HP5 film rated at EI 800, developed in Ilford DDX for 10 minutes and tweaked in lightroom. None of the 2025 pictures have been cropped.

Many thanks for reading.