During a photography tour of Europe, I was tasked with taking a series of five photos in Berlin, themed around surveillance. As a token designer in a group of photographers, I was encouraged to treat the series as graphic posters.
The five photos are from the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a prison preserved after the fall of the DDR, which was a period of intense surveillance in Berlin’s history. During my visit I was shocked by the near normalcy of the decor, soft furnishings and warm wallpapers, with only small marks to show the inhumane histories of the buildings.
I wanted to capture this contrast within the preserved offices and interrogation rooms, with a very subtle inclusion of these sinister details that may not even be noticed without the full context of the series.
This is juxtaposed against a quote from Stasi general secretary, Erich Honecker, split across the five images and translated as, “The communists in the Ministry of State Security departments work with the utmost reliability in order to further consolidate the power of the workers and farmers and to remain inviolable against any subversive attacks by the enemies of socialism.”
The typography is inspired by the rigidity and austerity of Russian Constructivist and Soviet design.