Born May 21, 1938, as Helga Steffens in Gollnow, Pomerania; died February 5, 2024, in Berlin, was a German photographer best known for her intimate and unsentimental documentation of everyday life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Life and Work

Helga Paris was born as the youngest of four children. Her father, Wilhelm Steffens, was a typesetter who died after 1945 in a Soviet labor camp. After completing her secondary education in Zossen, she studied fashion design from 1956 to 1960 at the School of Clothing Design in Berlin and completed an internship at the state-owned enterprise VEB Treffmodelle Berlin. She subsequently worked as a lecturer in costume studies and as a graphic designer.

From 1964 onward, Paris taught herself photography. Driven by a growing fascination with the medium, she worked as a photographic laboratory technician from 1967 to 1968 and then pursued a freelance career as a photographer. Her work encompassed a wide range of subjects. In 1975, she photographed stage productions by Benno Besson at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and in 1978 she held her first solo exhibition at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

Paris created numerous portraits of artists and writers from East Berlin, including Manfred Böttcher, Harald Metzkes, Heiner Müller, Nuria Quevedo, Cornelia Schleime, and Christa Wolf. Her portraits are noted for their natural, unposed quality, whether taken in studios or in everyday settings.

Her photographic work is particularly distinguished by its quiet yet powerful depiction of the unvarnished, gray everyday life of East Berlin. Much of this work was created in and around her home street, Winsstraße in the Prenzlauer Berg district, where she lived for more than five decades. Her images often convey a subtle tension between melancholy and attentiveness to the vitality present within monotony, capturing the atmosphere and social fabric of the time.

In the mid-1980s, Paris documented the severe architectural decay of Halle’s city center and its inhabitants. An exhibition titled Houses and Faces: Halle 1983–1985, planned for 1986 at the Galerie Marktschlößchen in Halle, was canceled shortly before its opening because the photographs openly exposed the failures of local housing policy. By that time, exhibition posters and a catalog had already been printed.

Helga Paris was a member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR from 1972 to 1990 and participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the GDR, West Berlin, and West Germany, including the 9th and 10th Art Exhibitions of the GDR in Dresden. From 1996 onward, she was a member of the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin.

In 2003, her twelve-part series Self-Portraits 1981–1988 received significant attention when shown as part of the exhibition Art in the GDR at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 2020, Paris donated her extensive archive—comprising over 230,000 negatives and approximately 6,300 rolls of film—to the Academy of Arts. She ceased professional photographic work in 2008.

Reference

Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition.
Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helga_Paris