Every photograph has a story. Most of them go quiet over time — folded into shoe boxes, tucked behind newer prints, the context slowly fading. You forget who was there, what the weather was like, why you pressed the shutter. The print endures. The story behind it doesn’t always. But even if the story has faded, holding a well-composed photograph — it starts to speak to you.
And if you are the photographer, some come back. You pull them out, and the whole thing is right there: the light, the air, the sound of your own breathing. Everything.
This one came back.
© Henry — Berliner Dom and Fernsehturm, East Berlin, 1974
Berlin, 1974. I was sixteen years old, standing in East Berlin with my late dad’s Zeiss Ikon loaded with 120 Agfa B&W film. If you’ve never walked through East Berlin with a camera during the Cold War — well, let’s just say it wasn’t encouraged. The Stasi — the East German Ministry for State Security — were everywhere, the paranoia was real, and pointing a lens at the wrong thing could turn a day trip into a very different kind of experience. You can ask the internet how that worked. No risk, no fun.
But I wasn’t pointing at anything political. Not deliberately. (I also photographed the Brandenburger Tor from the East Berlin side that day, which was very much not allowed — so maybe “not deliberately” is doing some heavy lifting here.)
I saw the Berliner Dom — this massive, ornate, crumbling symbol of imperial Germany — and rising directly behind it, from where I stood, the Fernsehturm. The GDR’s television tower, built just five years earlier as a monument to socialist progress. They stood apart in reality — but from my angle, the Tower seemed to grow straight out of the cathedral dome. A sleek modernist spike emerging from a 19th-century ruin. Old power, new power, one frame.
I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time. I just saw the geometry. The irony of the composition. That from this particular spot, at this particular moment, two structures that had nothing in common — historically, ideologically, architecturally — appeared to be one.
KLICK
I developed the negative myself, in my darkroom at home. Printed it with a Rodenstock Trinar enlarger lens on Agfa matte paper. I was sixteen. I didn’t know what I had. I just liked the way it looked.
The original negative got lost somewhere along the way — decades will do that — but this print survived. I restored it recently, cleaned it up as carefully as I could. And I think it holds up. Not because it’s technically perfect — it’s not — but because the composition tells a story that history has only made sharper.
When I pressed that shutter, the Wall was still up. Germany was still two countries, Berlin divided. The cathedral had been left half-ruined by the GDR for decades — they didn’t care much for imperial relics. And the Tower was their pride, their signal to the West: look what we built.
Both are still standing. The Wall is not.
A photograph can outlast the world that made it. That’s an unsettling thought, if you sit with it long enough.
This is the composition. The Fernsehturm’s sphere sits just above and right of the dome, and the spike continues the vertical line upward. Move ten meters in any direction and they separate into two buildings. I found the one spot where they fuse — at sixteen, on instinct.
But the meaning has been compounding for fifty years. Everything in the frame has changed its status. The Dom was a neglected war ruin — now it’s restored. The Fernsehturm was state propaganda — now it’s a tourist landmark. The Wall was a fact of life — now it’s a memory. The country that built the Tower no longer exists. Who would have thought the Wall would come down just fifteen years later.
The composition captured a tension I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. The frame saw more than the sixteen-year-old could explain. That’s what separates a photograph that holds up from one that’s merely nostalgic — it was ahead of its own understanding. A photographic eye saw something, and I pressed the shutter. That’s not luck. That’s seeing.
Why do some photographs immediately speak to you? I’m curious — does this one speak to you with a similar voice to the one it still speaks to me?
I’ve been flipping through old photographs a lot recently — working on a different project brought me back to them. And I keep noticing something. When I look at a photograph I made decades ago, I don’t just see the image. I see the moment. The weather. What I was thinking — or not thinking. The whole scene reconstructs itself, instantly and completely, as if the print were a key and the memory a lock.
That’s not how I experience digital snapshots from my phone. Those are records. Useful, sure. But they don’t carry the same weight. Maybe because there are too many of them. Maybe because they cost nothing to make. Maybe because the act of making them required no pause, no decision, no commitment.
When you load 120 film into a camera, you get eight frames. Or twelve, depending on the format. That’s it. Every press of the shutter is a small act of faith — you’re committing to something you can’t review, can’t delete, can’t undo. And that constraint changes the way you look. You slow down. You wait. You notice things you would have scrolled past.
I’ve started calling this — mostly to myself, sometimes out loud — mindfulness photography. The term probably isn’t original. But it describes something real: being fully present while you observe and capture your surroundings. Not chasing the perfect shot. Not optimizing for likes. Just… seeing. Light, texture, form. The weight of a shadow. The moment before something shifts.
I truly believe we are not designed for the constant noise we subject ourselves to. The feeds, the alerts, the opinions about opinions. The cognitive load is… too much. And most of it produces nothing — no insight, no memory, no growth. Just noise. Doing nothing, resting, pausing — these are not failures. They’re how we were built to function.
I didn’t return to analog photography to produce content. I returned to slow down, to notice, to see again. A camera can be a way back to that — not a phone camera, but a real camera, one that asks something of you before it gives anything back. For me, it’s the camera that opens the door. The art of seeing is what’s on the other side.
I look at this photograph now — the Dom, the Tower, the overcast Berlin sky — and I see a sixteen-year-old kid. Long hair, jeans, a parka, boots. His late father’s camera in his hands. Standing in a divided city, in a country that no longer exists, making a picture he wouldn’t understand for another fifty years.
And somehow the frame got it right.
That’s the thing about printed photographs. They’re patient. They wait for you to catch up.
— Henry
I publish my photography under my middle name Henry — a small tribute to my father Heinrich, and his lifelong love of making photographs.
If this resonates — my Zines are available via Blurb, or in Books & Prints. A preview below.
