In 1988 Manfred Paul was invited to go on a six-week trip to study in Paris. At the time this
was a rare opportunity for a photographer from East Germany to explore a country on the other
side of the Iron Curtain. He managed to borrow a Leica M3 from one of the staff at the French
Cultural Centre in Berlin looking through the viewfinder of this camera gave him a special
experience of Paris which changed his way of seeing and had a lasting effect on his
photography. The sixty-five pictures comprising Paris 1988 are not concerned with the tourist
version of Paris nor are they a social documentary exploration: rather they are a rehearsal
for a postmodernist visual practice. Paul sets up an opposition between the fragment and the
long shot instead of watching out for the decisive moment he is interested in the peripheral
aspects of an event. Sur-faces shop windows the everyday tokens and material qualities of
city life-impressions that no longer piece themselves together into a complete image but which
convey the atmosphere of the time: L'air de Paris. Manfred Paul has lived and worked in East
Berlin since 1968. He was one of the most important exponents of auteur photography in the GDR.
