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Berlin on a Dog’s Night by Gundula Schulze Eldowy.
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Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy
Spector Books, 2024. 340 pp., 320 illustrations, 8½x10¾x1¼".
It’s been over thirty years since the reunification of East and West Germany. But some major GDR photographers are still woefully under-recognized in the West. Gundula Schulze Eldowy is a prime example. Born in Erfurt in 1954, her career roughly straddled the forty-year lifespan of East Germany, before continuing into the present via Japan, Moscow, Turkey, New York, Bolivia, and other destinations. Even today as a septuagenarian, she remains a globetrotting whirlwind who has never stopped moving. Wiki lists her current residence as “Berlin and Peru”. Did I mention she once discovered an unknown shaft in the Great Pyramid of Egypt? Or that she is an accomplished poet? Or befriended Robert Frank in the 1980s?
Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit manifested from an early age. After settling in East Berlin in 1972, she traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain during the seventies, a camera always at her side. Gradually her energies galvanized around her adopted home city, where she probed the local alleys, evenings, and residents. Her gritty b/w photographs of Berlin’s underbelly were eventually compiled into the multi-year project Berlin in einer Hundenacht, which translates to English as Berlin on a Dog’s Night.
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Published as a book in 2011 by Lehmstedt Verlag, Berlin on a Dog’s Night made a minor splash in America and Europe. It remains her signature work, and if you know her photos at all, it is likely through this monograph. Unfortunately, as happens too often with first edition photobooks, it has fallen out of print and become relatively hard to find. Meanwhile, a belated wave of interest in GDR photographers has been gaining steam, cresting at Rencontres d'Arles with the group exhibition Restless Bodies: East German Photography 1980-1989, curated by Sonia Voss in 2019. Gundula Schulze Eldowy was one of several legendary elders included, along with Ulrich Wüst, Gabriele Stötzer, Ute Mahler, and many more.
The timing feels ripe for rediscovery, and Spector has jumped on the moment with a new edition of Berlin on a Dog’s Night. It’s a handsome grey hardback, dense with more than 300 pages of b/w photos. The fusty original cover image has been replaced with bold yellow lettering, and the original contents supplemented with dozens of extra photos. In addition to Berlin on a Dog’s Night, there are short selections from other projects. We’ll get to those in a moment, but first the title series, which occupies the first 2/3 of the book.
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Berlin on a Dog’s Night was a wide ranging series of photos shot between 1977-1990. As sequenced in the book, the dates are jumbled into a timeless trail of broken scenes. Like a stray hound, Schulze Eldowy poked her nose just about everywhere. One photo captures anguished kids huddled on a sidewalk. Another shows a messy domestic interior. Street portraits in passing capture pedestrians looking back at Schulze Eldowy with befuddled stares, hair mussed, shirts untucked. Photos of coke-bottle glasses, clotheslines, and litter blend with brick facades and overgrown lots for layers of squalor. It’s a dog’s eye view of Berlin indeed, and a grimy feral mutt at that.
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During the Cold War, the GDR was proudly keen to show its good side to the world. Schulze Eldowy did not fit the state’s aims, and the German Stasi sometimes put roadblocks in her way. But Schulze Eldowy persisted. In fact she may have gone a step overboard in subverting the GDR’s self mythology. Did East Berlin actually look this shabby in real life? Perhaps not. But if she took artistic license, the ends justified the means. Every picture supported her singular and poetic vision. Add a filter of grainy monochrome on flat matte pages, and this book encapsulates the dull routine of life in the former Iron Curtain better than any other photobook.
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I’ve mentioned Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit, and it seems she was usually juggling a few things at once. Overlapping with the 70s-80s timeline of Berlin on a Dog’s Night were various other photo projects including The Wind Fills Itself With Water, Nude Portraits, Work, and Tamerlan. Samplings of each one are included here, with 10 or 20 photos per series. From this limited selection it’s hard to discern how extensive these projects were, if they deserved their own books (none were published as monographs), or if they were mere side projects. My guess is the former. If there isn’t quite enough material for a proper analysis, there’s certainly enough to spark curiosity. Each of the extra chapters tantalizes with strong photography. They include wonderfully strange nudes, industrial labor scenes, and an intimate view of an aging friend. They may range in subject, but their honest vulnerability jibes perfectly with the title project’s unsettling overtones. The book’s design helps integrate everything into a whole, dispensing with chapter headings so that one series bleeds into the next. (Captions and series titles are reserved for a double spread near the beginning.)
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Schulze Eldowy’s photos are descriptive and powerful. They’d be enough on their own for a dynamite book. The good news is they’re packaged here with an added bonus. A delightful introductory essay by Schulze Eldowy recounts some of her life story, with anecdotes about photography, friends, and adventures in blunt language. It’s a fantastic piece of first-person prose, informative, intimate, and memoiristic, a proper match for the pictures. Together they make the new Berlin on a Dog’s Night a treat. Hopefully this book will introduce Schulze Eldowy’s work to new audiences and a new generation. I’m happy to count myself among the freshly converted.
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