Berlin. Die stadt und die beute

The striking contrast between the snarling dogs velvet tongue and its sharp white teeth arguably provides a unifying metaphor for the images in Berlin Die Stadt und die Beute.. The concentrated, high-octane focus of feral instincts on the immediate environment closely parallels the photographers fascinated gaze upon a reality constantly in flux. Pulse racing, breath bated. The photographs of Berlin could be oneiric moments retrieved from a beasts deep slumber in which menace, desire and the lightning capture of prey abruptly displace each other. With their dense, expressive, textured appearance, the images might have been lifted out of an alien creatures dream, whose content forever eludes us. Glimpses of inbred physical fury, soft quiverings of the skin, slight muscular contractions. Here, Berlin is figured as a series of moments and signs that edgily but gently stitches together a personal lifeworld, a collective topography and an inescapable historical resonance. The buildings, the people, the animals, coexist in a strange photographic universe which, while bringing them into view, also disguises them. While everything is exposed to us, its envelopment in a sort of dank mist plucks it from us again. Berlin becomes synonymous with an eroticism that ruthlessly tears your eyes to shreds while soothing the pain by salty kisses. The city is a distant memory: akin to the heavy flesh of the phallus, a pulsating body of asphalt and concrete, every fibre erect, sensuous and unreachable. Its a truceless conflict, a love affair, a scar. City and prey. Ingestion.