I have finally gotten my recent Berlin film developed and scanned. The pictures came out well, and there’s a lot to work with. Primarily, I am interested in two or three images to round out the portfolio I am working on: New York, Amsterdam, Berlin.

The Jewish Museum, Berlin (4×5 film)

One of the images has to be this one of the Jewish Museum. Having visited the museum before I had a sense of what I wanted to do, which was to show the relationship between the museum building and the adjacent low income housing projects. The area was virtually obliterated during World War II, and has been rebuilt in a hodge podge manner without any sense of coherence. Libeskind’s museum building, an abstracted Star of David, appears as a jagged thunderbolt in the midst of this landscape.

From the ground it is difficult to visually connect the museum structure to the housing projects, but it’s possible to do so tangentially, showing a piece of the building or a recognizable element of the museum garden. As I wrote before, it is supremely ironic that the residents surrounding the Jewish Museum are largely Muslim immigrants, and evidence of that can be seen in the numerous satellite dishes afixed to the residential buildings.

The day was extremely unsettled with squalls sweeping across the sky. When one particularly fierce looking storm moved in I dashed over to a postion I had scoped out earlier and took a series of pictures with the 4×5 camera.

Jewish Museum garden and nearby housing projects (4×5 film)

Later, I made a photograph looking south toward the apartment towers with the the Garden of Exile and Emigration (the concrete pillars with willows emerging from within) seen in the foreground. This, too, is a successful photograph, but has less drama and mystery. I like the relationship between the concrete structures of the garden and the tower blocks behind.