Still Life Photographs 1983-1985

This series of still life photographs by Manfred Paul were produced while the GDR still existed. As photographs they go beyond the general symbols of still life; they are time doubly frozen, as where the fish, leaves and branches at the bottom of the lake have been frozen into a still-life photograph, as if petrified in clear ice before the first snowfall. Things are abandoned, with apparent carelessness – a bunch of tulips in a glass vase wilts in infinite beauty, their black-and-white sharpness emits an almost painful appeal against the transience and replaceability of the blooms. In their irredeemable alienation they inevitably become a devotional mental image of human existence.