Helga Paris: Photography, by Sara Pleșa Popescu, ITA, II

       An exhibition of the German artist Helga Paris, one of the most famous contemporary photographers, opened at the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca on Thursday, April 19. The exhibition is organized by the German Cultural Center in partnership with the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca and realized by the German Institute for International Relations and it will last until May 12.  At the official opening were present Franziska Schmidt, cultural manager, art historian, art critic and expert in photography, Ingo Tegge, director of the German Cultural Center, prof. univ. dr. Lucian Nastasa-Kovács, director of the Museum of Art Cluj-Napoca and dr. Dan Breaz, the commissioner of the exhibition at the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca. The opening was followed by an open public debate on the theme of "The portrait of the daily life", between Franziska Schmidt, Ingo Tegge and Cluj photographer Andrei Niculescu.

       Helga Paris was born a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1938, in Pomerania. She studied fashion design in East Berlin, and in the year of 1964, she made her debut in photography. From 1996, she became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the photographer embarked on an in-depth analysis of her own early wartime and postwar experiences. Groups of works on this theme are also on show.

       Helga Paris refers to her photos as members of the family – while the people from those photos have forgotten her long ago and the times are already gone, she carries with herself each photo and each face from within. Each photograph functions as an anchor of the psyche in the human origin of the self. The empirical knowledge, the artist’s empathy and her interaction with the people behind the photos shape the compositions, but never as much as to impair their authenticity. But besides all that, what exactly makes Helga's art so special?

       The works exposed evoke the memory of the precarious times, far from the sign of good luck and a good living, outlining the artist’s routing from the industrial town Halle, Georgia, Polonia to Transylvania of the 80's. She captured unguarded aspects of everyday life, beyond their poeticization or suppression of historical truth: "Houses and girls", "Children with masks", "The Bulgarian dancers" - are just some of the topics covered by the artist in the 133 photos in black and white presented at the exhibition. The middle social classes, with scenes of apartments and dance halls, as well as the social underclass, with sanitation workers and homeless people, the childhood and the uncensored youth, the maturity and its related illnesses – all of these can be found in the artist’s works exposed at the Bánffy Palace. People seen on the streets appear to realize only partially the photographic moment: as they often gaze directly into the frame, at the same time, they are absent, looking somewhere far away. There were, of course, moments in which the closeness with those people has not been easy, as she sometimes uses to mention. Negative reactions were most often encountered among the beggars and the proletarian class, coming in response to the discontent of their poverty and suffering in which they were often forced to live, but this has not stopped the artist in her attempt to overcome together with them the barriers of some preconceived ideas.

       The exhibition is dramatic, of an overflowing frankness – a truthful anatomy of the human melancholy. The artist’s naturality emerges through her photos, producing an art reduced to the deconstruction and the reconstruction of the simplest forms of existence. Her pictures are not just an experiment in regard to the life of the socialist German and Eastern European countries, but also a portal between two different times and worlds. In a century where the aspirations poured one after another and the repercussions of the political and social conflicts, wars and poverty were felt at every step of the way, away from the promise of the absolute good and the utopia of an ideal world, the artist dared to show the naked reality. Through her photos, Helga Paris created bits of perpetual memories and stories, a string of a memory of a memory, expressing through them the helplessness in front of the temporality of life, succeeding at the same time to transpose the fears and worries, but also the hopes and simple joys of the human being, beyond appearances and the circumstances of the given cold times.