For forty years photography in Berlin was held hostage, like the city, in a heart-rending ideological struggle, a new war of representation, played out in large part via the image, still and in motion. Protagonist of the great season of photographic reportage in the democracies of the latter half of the twentieth century and instrument of propaganda in the totalitarian regimes of the East, photography narrated and incarnated the division of the two blocs. It focused on that wall built by Soviet power, the materialization of the Iron Curtain that cut through Europe, separating East from West, socialism from consumer capitalism.
