[Photo Series] Berlin in Cheap Film
Berlin’s city image is all but a sum of stereotypical beliefs: its diversity, crowds, wild parties, the dirt, drugs and grime. Yet so often people criticize this image as overused, exaggerated, and romanticized through films, the media, and advertising campaign.
My intention is to capture Berlin in its most unromanticized image as possible, but yet, beneath the layers of cheap film and haphazard photography, to allow my readers to be able to feel how Berlin is like through my photographs. This photo series documents how I moved through paths, landmarks, nodes, edges and districts (Lynch 1960), as I try capturing the Berlin subculture through its elements. Berlin in Cheap Film documents how Berlin is viewed by an outsider. This photo series consist of 2 phases: Phase one shows stereo-typically iconic and popular images of Berlin, places where a tourist would normally visit. These images are important, as it shows Berlin stereotypically — and it is through the continued reproduction of these images that helps shape collective memory and historical significance of what Berlin is like, both to outsiders, and its citizens.
Ryan Chong introduced me to documentary street photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the works of Robert Frank’s photography series: The Americans. The intention was to adopt traditional documentary style in the sequencing of the photos, where an overarching theme: ‘Capturing the Everyday Lives of Berliners’ was adopted prior to the taking of the photographs. The images were supposed to speak of a narrative,and more photos should have been taken so that at the very least, to adopt documentary photographers’ means of sequencing and eliminating photos in a series. Yet, due to my short time in Berlin, I did none of that, so the photos taken were very much amateur, and a little slip-shod. Still, I hope it at least conveyed my intentions.
Disposable cameras were used, and its film negatives, placed on the cover page of this book. I did this to show that the photos taken in this series are one of its kind- and not images that can be digitalized or reproduced. An increasingly visual world has led to the taking and reproduction of thousands of digitalized images. Through my travels, I was very much exposed to a disturbing practice- the obsession with images, with the self at its centre, and so often do people focus on capturing a visual, that they no longer take time to appreciate what is real. As humans do, we all want something permanent, and to concretise a moment that is fleeting, is indeed appropriate. Yet, we go halfway across the world to see the Mona Lisa (or any other monument, for the matter), only to spend 5 seconds taking a digital replication of it, and 2 more interacting with the painting itself. To see digital photography, ‘selfies’, and images centering on the self- take precedence over art, over the historical significance of a place, and most of all, over being present, is something that I find not only highly disturbing, but also heart-breaking.
Berlin in Cheap Film hope to subvert that: to show that images are precious but cheap, disposable- to say the least. Like these images that are only taken once, and no longer replicable, memories are supposed to be valued as such. To experience whatever it is for a given period, and when it is time to let it go, to let it go.








