Amazing Photographs Capture Everyday Life in East Berlin in the Mid-1980s

The first time Harf Zimmermann visited East Berlin’s Hufelandstrasse neighborhood, he sensed it was unlike any other neighborhood he’d known in East Germany. Linden trees lined the streets, as did many privately-owned shops, an unusual sight in a socialist state.

Mr. Zimmermann moved to Hufelandstrasse in 1980. He was 25 years old and living in his first apartment, a small studio assigned to him by the socialist administration because he’d agreed to fix a gutter that sometimes leaked through the window. Two years later, he started studying photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Inspired by Bruce Davidson’s book, East 100th Street, which cataloged a single block in East Harlem, Mr. Zimmermann began regularly photographing people and places in his own neighborhood.

“I was out with my camera nearly every day,” he told The New York Times. “I had become part of the landscape.”

At first, he said, his neighbors found his creative endeavor confusing. Whenever they’d seen a camera in Hufelandstrasse before, it was typically a newspaper photographer who wanted them to pose in ways that enforced prevailing socialist tropes. Mr. Zimmermann, meanwhile, just asked them to stand simply as they were.

In 1986, he started shooting exclusively with a large-format camera, a practice he continued for the next year and a half. The photographs from that period are now collected in Hufelandstrasse, 1055 Berlin.

Herr and Frau Fleischer in their engagement outfits with their dog Putzi.

Frau Baer (center) with her daughter, her grandchild, and her daughter’s partner on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the GDR.

The rock group Phonolog.

My neighbor Frau Töpfer with her grandson René.

The bride and groom Frau and Herr Dressler, who have booked the package “traditional wedding, celebrating 750 years of Berlin.”

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31 Hilarious Ways to Make Girls Looked So Cool in the 1940s

Each girl has her own way of expressing herself. And these girls from the 1940s knew how to make themselves looked cool.

1. Become a cockpit hottie.

2. Dress up as a cadet nurse.

3. In the coolest prom gown.

4. Or in checkered pants.

5. Drink together anywhere.

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Elvis Presley Signing an Autograph for a 12-Year Old Madonna in 1970?

It's being discussed on internet, the picture below has surfaced on some Elvis fan sites and it's been taken in September 11, 1970 in front of the Olympia of Detroit. Many thinks this is the young Madonna in her home city. But we don't know...

According to Brian's Elvis Corner, Elvis Presley arrived in Detroit late Friday for his Olympia concert performance with all the mystery, intrigue and excitement of a top presidential visit. The aura around him, personified by his presence and created by his management, can knock you over.

Presley emerged from his limousine at 4:40 p.m. and moved toward the service entrance of the Detroit Hilton, where his troupe had rented 75 rooms. He was dark black hair, black outfit with blue shirt and that cool, cool, almost laughing, almost sullen look behind silver-rimmed blue shades.

About 40 spectators - mostly girls in their early 20s from the nearby Auto Club office - surged around him. First there were squeals, then pushing. Elvis' guards tried to clear the way. He stopped. Autographs.

Elvis didn't say anything to the girls. He didn't have to. A sleepy look, the half smile and a well-practiced lip twitch did the trick...

More photos from Elvis' show in Detroit on September 12, 1970:

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8 Things You May Not Know About the Hollywood Sign

Erected sometime in 1923, the Hollywood sign has long welcomed aspiring actors looking to make it big in Los Angeles. And despite decades of run-ins with vandals, pranksters and developers, among others, it has managed to hang on to its prime location near the summit of Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills. Explore some surprising facts about this famed symbol of the U.S. movie industry.

1. The Hollywood sign is only slightly younger than the district itself.

This is what Hollywood looked like at the turn of the 20th century.

Harvey and Daeida Wilcox founded Hollywood in 1887 as a community for likeminded followers of the temperance movement. No one knows for sure why they chose that name. One theory is that Daeida met a woman on a train with a summer home called Hollywood. Alternatively, it may have been a reference to the area’s abundant toyon, a red-berried shrub also known as California holly. Either way, Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in 1903 and merged with Los Angeles in 1910, the year before the first film studio moved there.


2. The sign was created as a real-estate advertisement.

A 1929 publicity photo for the Hollywoodland groundbreaking shows a plow, mules and surveyors.

By 1923 Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler had decided to invest in an upscale real-estate development called Hollywoodland, which capitalized on the growing recognition of Hollywood as a movie-industry mecca. In order to promote the project, Chandler and his partners put up $21,000 (over $250,000 in today’s money) for 45-foot-high white block letters that were anchored to telephone poles and illuminated by 4,000 light bulbs. At night the billboard flashed in four stages: “Holly,” then “Wood,” then “Land” and then the entire word, “Hollywoodland.” Newspaper articles from the time show that the sign was completed in 1923; however, the exact date is disputed.


3. A struggling actress took her life there.

NEW YORK TIMES, September 20, 1932 Page 2 has one column heads including: "PEG ENTWISTLE DIES IN HOLLYWOOD LEAP" "Actress Ends Life by Jumping Off Fifty-Foot Sign After Failure in the Movies" and more with a photo of Entwistle.

Although the Hollywood sign symbolizes glamour and stardom, it can also represent broken dreams. In spring 1932 stage actress Peg Entwistle moved from New York City to Los Angeles to try her luck with movies. Soon after she received a part in a murder-mystery film, but the studio reportedly did not renew the option on her contract upon its completion. That September the 24-year-old allegedly climbed a ladder to the “H” on the Hollywoodland sign and jumped off. Her body was later discovered in a ravine downhill. Various newspapers cited her failing acting career as the reason she killed herself. Ironically, a letter had been mailed to her just before her death offering her the lead role in a play about a young woman who commits suicide.


4. Four letters on the sign were eventually removed.

The "OLLYWOODLAND" sign, 1949.

Regular maintenance on the sign stopped when the Hollywoodland real-estate development went under due to the Great Depression. The “H” even toppled over, so that it briefly read “Ollywoodland.” After ownership of the sign passed to the city in the mid-1940s, the L.A. Recreation and Parks Commission apparently wanted it razed. But the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in, and in 1949 it removed the last four letters and restored the rest.


5. A new sign replaced the old one in the 1970s.

The new Hollywood sign, circa November 1978.

Despite the 1949 restoration, the Hollywood sign eventually began to deteriorate once again. The third “O,” for example, tumbled down the side of Mount Lee, and arsonists set fire to the bottom of the second “L.” In 1978, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner held a gala at his mansion, where he and eight other donors, including rock musician Alice Cooper, pledged nearly $28,000 each to fund a replacement. After a three-month period without a sign, construction finished up later that year. The new sign was the same size as the old one, but with structural improvements such as steel footings rather than telephone poles. Since then, it has periodically received a fresh coat of white paint, most recently in December 2012.

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25 Fascinating Vintage Photographs Capture Everyday Life in East Berlin During the 1970s and the 1980s

Bernd Heyden’s photographic vision remains fascinating to this day. Viewers not only experience passers-by from a former time, but gain insights into the living conditions and everyday life in East Berlin of the 1970s and 1980s. Along with people working in the stores and on the streets, Heyden took portraits of the old, frail and stranded as well as the merry, sad, cheeky children for whom the broken-down neighbourhood around Prenzlauer Allee was a gigantic playground.

For the East Berliner photographer Bernd Heyden, Berlin is first and foremost a backdrop against which life unfolds. All of a sudden, in finely gradated tones of grey, a sense of familiarity with this lost world is there again. Heyden (1940-1984) started taking pictures in the mid-1960s; beginning in 1967, he worked in the Club of Young Photographers, founded by Arno Fischer and Sibylle Bergemann. Nearly all of his existing photographs of Prenzlauer Berg were taken between 1970 and 1980, a total of well over one thousand motifs.

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22 Amazing Color Snapshots That Capture Street Scenes of Berlin in the Early 1950s

In the aftermath of World War II, Berlin was a city like nowhere else, with palpable atmosphere and decay. These amazing color photos from Found Slides show street scenes of Berlin in 1953.

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Amazing Portrait Photos of Teenage Girls From the Victorian Era

An amazing photo collection shows dresses that Victorian teenage girls often wore from the 19th century.

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30 Gorgeous Portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe Taken by Alfred Stieglitz From Between the 1910s and 1930s

Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz met in 1916, when she paid a visit to 291 to see an exhibition of Marsden Hartley works. Nearly twenty-four years his junior and just gaining recognition as a painter, O’Keeffe made an immediate impact on Stieglitz—both artistically and emotionally.

The two began an avid, often daily correspondence that eventually turned into a passionate affair before they finally married in 1924. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, O’Keeffe was appointed executor of his estate, and she divided the Stieglitz Collection among several institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago.

O’Keeffe’s presence revitalized Stieglitz’s photography, which he had neglected in favor of the journal Camera Work and his gallery. She first posed for him in the spring of 1917, and as their relationship deepened, he continued to photograph her “with a kind of heat and excitement.”

Over the next twenty years, he made over three hundred portraits of her—nude and clothed, performing mundane tasks and posing dramatically in front of her paintings, showing her entire body as well as isolated views of her neck, hands, breasts, and feet. O’Keeffe wrote that Stieglitz’s “idea of a portrait was not just one picture”; instead, it was a composite of pictures addressing an idea and personality too large to fit in a single photograph.

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Family Pets in Bizarre and Fabulous Vintage Holiday Greeting Cards

Many of us would, given the choice, rather spend holidays with our pets than our families. Robert E. Jackson’s Instagram shows us humankind’s love for pets in this gallery of fabulous family Christmas and New Year cards in which the pets are to the fore.

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An American Photographer Captured London Street Style in the 1970s and 1980s

Al Vandenberg (1932-2012) was an American photographer notable for his street portraiture and collaboration on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles.

During the 1970s and 1980s, his series of black and white photographs caught and preserved the spirit of the times for future reference. Turning his back on commercial work and tiring of ‘spying on poor people for middle-class audiences’ he moved to London where he set about capturing the youthful, vibrant times of a city in flux, paying close attention to the diverse multiculturalism he found.

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