Berlin

Berlin is the capital of Germany, a city of about 3.7 million spread across the Spree and Havel rivers. The historic centre sits in the Mitte district, where the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, Berlin Cathedral, and Museum Island cluster within a 30 minute walk of each other. The TV Tower on Alexanderplatz, at 368 metres, is still the tallest structure in the country, and the post-Wall government district along the Spree has added a contemporary architectural layer over the historic one. Almost a third of the city’s surface is parks, lakes, and forest, which is why most of my Berlin work splits between two extremes: the dense centre, and the quiet northern lakes around Tegel.

Alexanderplatz

A 30 minute thunderstorm over the cathedral, shot from the 19th floor of the Park Inn. That balcony was the original plan for a sunset. Rain wasn’t forecast before 11pm, so when the clouds rolled in over the TV Tower I almost packed up. The balcony was sheltered enough to keep working, and when the storm passed it left a pink sky behind the Berliner Dom that I would not have got from the street.

The square itself is the symbolic centre of former East Berlin: post-war buildings, a TV Tower completed in 1969, the whole space rebuilt as socialist urbanism. At ground level the Urania World Clock has stood here since 1969 and is still one of the most reliable meeting points in the centre. Friends used to say “meet at the World Time Clock” before heading out, and the phrase has barely changed in 30 years.

The Park Inn by Radisson on the same square has 37 floors and a rooftop viewing platform open to non-guests for a small fee. The TV Tower sits at eye level, the cathedral reads in the foreground over the Spree, and the western horizon stretches out to the Funkturm and the Olympic Stadium on clear evenings. If you book a room, take one on the side facing the TV Tower; the opposite side looks out over GDR-era apartment blocks.

TV Tower from Storkower Straße

The most photographed view of the TV Tower is from the cathedral side. The most useful one, for me, is from the east. Storkower Straße, a few stops out on the S-Bahn ring, lines the tower up with the Berliner Dom, the Rotes Rathaus, and (much further back) the Funkturm radio tower in the west. From a single bridge you get four landmarks in one frame, which is rare in a city this spread out.

I have shot this view in three different conditions: a sky panorama after a heavy rainstorm cleared, an autumn scene blended from two captures (sunset on the background, blue hour on the foreground half an hour later), and a tilt-shift night frame where the dull foreground is blurred so the eye lands on the skyline. None of them would have worked on a clear day. The bridge needs weather to do anything interesting.

Brandenburg Gate

Most photos of the gate are taken from the eastern side. Pariser Platz is closed to cars, the tourists gather there, and the Quadriga’s Victoria faces east, which makes that side feel like the front. The western side is less obvious but has two things photographers care about: the colour of the rising sun behind the columns, and light trails from passing cars on Straße des 17. Juni. A small aperture (f/22), three second exposures, and you get both the headlights and the blinking indicators.

During the yearly Festival of Lights in October the gate is projected with rotating illuminations. The red rose theme is the most recognisable; the link to Paris is easy to read. The festival is also the worst time to find a clear composition: every photographer in Berlin is on the same square. The trick I use is to arrive a day before the official start, when the test illuminations are sometimes already running but the crowd has not formed yet. Underneath Pariser Platz, the U55 station Brandenburger Tor still runs almost empty and is one of the cleanest U-Bahn stations in the city to photograph.

Government District

The Reichstag, with its glass dome by architect Norman Foster, sits on a bend of the Spree across from the Paul-Löbe-Haus, the parliamentary office building completed in 2001. The contrast between 19th-century stone and contemporary glass is why this stretch of river is one of my favourite walks in Berlin. The dome is open to the public, free of charge, with advance booking through the Bundestag.

The district works best on rainy evenings. Wet pavement reflects the buildings as cleanly as the river does, and the concrete-and-glass ministries stop reading as cold once the surface gets wet. A small coffee shop with curved walls, tucked between the sharp edges of the offices, was a frame I carried in my head for months before I shot it. The dry circle under its roof against the wet tarmac around it was the whole picture.

Berlin Cathedral

The Berliner Dom, completed in 1905, is the largest church in Berlin and, despite its scale, Protestant rather than Catholic. The dome reads against the TV Tower from almost any point along the Spree, which is why the two end up together in most Berlin skylines. The cathedral was heavily damaged in the war and reopened only in 1993 after a long restoration.

This single frame happened by accident. The next evening was the supermoon, and I had already scouted a position near Oranienburger Straße for the shot. Daria and I walked the river with two beers, not planning to photograph anything, until she kept saying how beautiful the cathedral looked with the moon just above it. I unpacked the tripod for one frame. The supermoon night the next day clouded out completely, so this was the only moon photo I got that year.

Museum Island

Museum Island sits in the Spree just upstream of the cathedral and holds five museums: the Pergamon, the Bode, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Neues Museum, and the Altes Museum. The ensemble has been on the UNESCO list since 1999, recognised as a rare 19th-century vision of museums as a single civic complex (Museumsinsel).

The Bode, on the north-west tip of the island, is the most photogenic from outside. The dome and curved facade catch the river on three sides, and at low light the building reads almost like a ship moored against the current. Inside, it holds one of the largest Byzantine collections in the world, plus medieval and Renaissance sculpture including works attributed to Donatello. A short walk south, the Neue Wache (designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, completed in 1818) is Germany’s central memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship. Inside the bare hall, Käthe Kollwitz’s “Mother with her Dead Son” stands under an open oculus: rain falls directly onto the sculpture, and snow lands on it in winter.

Bebelplatz and Gendarmenmarkt

A few steps further along Unter den Linden, Bebelplatz is framed by Humboldt University, the Staatsoper, and St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. The square’s most important feature is invisible at first sight: set into the paving stones is a glass panel; through it you look down into a small white empty room lined with shelves built for the books that were burned here on 10 May 1933. The inscription on the edge quotes Heinrich Heine: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” It was written more than a century before the burning happened on this exact spot.

A short walk south, the Gendarmenmarkt is the most balanced square in central Berlin: the Konzerthaus in the middle, the Deutscher Dom on the south end, and the French Cathedral (Französischer Dom) facing it from the north. The French Cathedral is the older of the pair, built by the Huguenot community in the early 18th century. The German Cathedral was destroyed in the war and rebuilt after reunification, since the square sat in former East Berlin.

I shot this frame one day before the Festival of Lights officially started, by accident. I thought the festival had already begun and was annoyed to find half the illuminations missing. The Deutscher Dom turned out to be the exception: lit just enough to read against the night sky, with almost no other photographers around because everyone was on the Konzerthaus side. A handful of people walked through over the course of the exposures.

Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz was destroyed in the war and stayed largely empty for the entire GDR period: the Wall ran straight across it. After 1989 it was rebuilt from scratch as a contemporary commercial district, with the Sony Center and the Daimler buildings setting the architectural tone. My grandfather used to describe the spot as meadows and a pond before the new towers arrived, which is hard to imagine now standing in the middle of the plaza.

For the long exposure I waited three months on the weather. To get clean cloud movement above the towers I needed strong wind from the west; with anything weaker the clouds smear flat. The actual shoot was around five hours. From the Brandenburg Gate, walk right and Potsdamer Platz is the next iconic stretch of architecture worth the time.

City West

If you walk Kurfürstendamm or Tauentzienstraße, you can occasionally feel how Berlin must have looked in its 1920s decade: KaDeWe at one end of the boulevard, the Memorial Church at the other, and a cabaret history that ran through this district before the war. The west side of the city kept its bourgeois character even after reunification, while the centre of gravity for nightlife has shifted east.

Further west, the Olympic Stadium was completed in 1936 and capped at around 74,000 after the 2006 World Cup renovation. As a Hertha BSC supporter I have been in that stadium for over 14 years. The light only enters cleanly through the open western gate on a handful of days a year, and on 10 March 2014 the conditions lined up: a delivery truck pulled out, the gate stayed open for a few minutes, and the sun cut through the gap and broke against the bowl that holds the Olympic flame. Between the stadium and the city, the Funkturm radio tower (1924-1926) and the largely empty International Congress Centre next to it form a different version of west Berlin: futurism that has aged into nostalgia.

Alt-Tegel

Alt-Tegel is the northern district where I lived 95% of my life before moving to Portugal. Locally there is a saying about the “Berliner Pflanze” (Berlin plant): once you put roots down, you stay there until you die. Both my parents and grandparents grew up in this district. I am the exception in the family.

The Sechserbrücke, a small five-penny bridge over the Tegeler Hafen built in 1908, is the most photographed structure in the area. The cobblestone streets nearby still carry working freshwater pumps from the late 19th century. We went back one autumn to clean out the old apartment, and I shot most of the Tegel series that week, knowing it might be the last time I worked the area in autumn colours.

Lake Tegel

Lake Tegel is the second-largest lake in Berlin, covering roughly 4.6 square kilometres at a maximum depth of 24 metres. The forest around the northern shore is dense enough that you forget you are still inside the German capital; you can walk an hour without crossing a road.

In autumn the trees along the Greenwich Promenade turn through every shade between yellow and rust. The promenade is named after the London district of Greenwich, twinned with Reinickendorf, the Berlin borough that contains the lake. The cannons along the path were a gift from Greenwich. The Moby Dick steamer, shaped like a whale, crosses the harbour on the hour: my grandparents used to take me on it as a child for the full route down to Wannsee. When I moved to Portugal there were rumours that the boat would be retired; on the autumn trip back, it was still moored at Tegeler Hafen.

When to Visit Berlin

Late April through June and September through October give the best balance of mild weather, long days, and dependable evening light. July and August can be hot, and Berliners often leave for the Baltic. December is dense around the Christmas markets at Gendarmenmarkt and in front of the Rotes Rathaus, but daylight is short and the light is grey. Winter overall is wet and cold, which suits the government district and the cathedral better than the parks. Three full days covers Mitte, Museum Island, and a sunset from Alexanderplatz. A fourth day adds the Olympic Stadium, the Funkturm, or Lake Tegel in the north. A fifth opens Potsdam and Sanssouci, half an hour west by regional train.

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