Between 1994 and 1999, Berlin stood at a threshold, still marked by the traces of division yet already vibrating with a new kind of energy. It was a city that had not yet decided what it wanted to become, a space of contradictions and experiments, raw and unfinished. In ANFANG / BEGINNING, Christian Stemmler revisits this uncertain yet fertile moment through his own photographs, a collection that functions less as documentation and more as a lived memory of transformation. His images trace a city and a generation in motion: nights that blur into mornings, fleeting friendships, and rooms filled with both exhaustion and desire.

What began as a private act, taking photographs without purpose or audience, has turned almost three decades later into a visual testimony of an era that feels distant and yet strangely familiar. Stemmler’s images were made instinctively, without a sense of belonging to a photographic discourse. They emerged from daily life: improvised portraits on wrinkled bedsheets, snapshots in smoky clubs, fragments of faces and gestures captured on public transport or in shared flats. In their unpolished immediacy, they reveal a city that was still learning to breathe again, open, unpredictable, and porous.

Viewed today, these photographs are more than remnants of youth; they are fragments of a collective state of mind. They show Berlin before it was redefined by capital and global attention, when chaos and creativity existed side by side and possibility seemed endless. Stemmler’s return to these negatives—scanning, revisiting, remembering—becomes a quiet act of excavation. It is less about looking back than about reconnecting with a time, a feeling, and the reasons one begins to create in the first place.

ANFANG / BEGINNING unfolds as both remembrance and renewal. It reflects the vitality of a city that has always been a projection surface for ideas of freedom, and it marks the reawakening of an artist who once set the camera aside. The images resist nostalgia; instead, they evoke a form of sincerity that feels rare today, a closeness to life that is neither curated nor composed. Stemmler’s Berlin was rough, direct, and unguarded. His photographs preserve that atmosphere, allowing it to linger: the noise of a night that never really ended, and the quiet that always followed.

The second edition of ANFANG / BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994–99 will be launched on November 6, 2025, at Voo Store, Oranienstraße 24, Berlin — an opportunity to experience Stemmler’s work in direct conversation with the spirit of its time and to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of a Berlin that no longer exists.