Photographer Chris John Dewitt visited – and snapped – both sides of the Berlin wall during the eighties…
We can all be grateful to English photographer Chris John Dewitt for not only documenting his travels to Berlin during the 1980s, but uploading many of them to Tumblr.
Using an Olympus OM2n SLR camera plus a swag-bag of lenses, Dewitt’s travels around both East and West Berlin show gritty and weathered scenes from one of the most fascinating decades in Berlin’s history. Featuring Trabants, DDR guards, the wall, protest marches and the 1980s street styles of students, activists and officials, the images show a particularly pockmarked Berlin that was still in many ways slowly rebuilding itself post-war.
Dewitt reflects on a memorable encounter as a foreigner photographer crossing through Checkpoint Charlie and into East Berlin: “When I got there I began taking pictures, but was very quickly stopped by two young policemen. It took some while to work out what it was I shouldn’t have been photographing.
“It wasn’t the site of the Reich Chancellery, they replied to my questions, or even the wall. It was because in the distance, poking up from the other side of the wall, the Reichstag building could be seen. One mustn’t photograph buildings on the other side of the wall they said. The fact that I could go there on the Western side and take as many pictures of it as I liked made no difference. That was the rule which I must obey whilst on DDR soil”.
Two DDR grenzpolizei standing on the western side of t…