'Berlin is a city of contrasts. In one way it looks like so many other capital cities with its shopping malls and designer names. Look deeper and you see signs of the past. A number of buildings still fully bear the scars of the hail of shrapnel and bullets which flew towards the end of the Second World War.'
Eion Johnston's Berlin in Stone uses a creative, contemporary photographic approach to create two bodies of work inspired by the history of Berlin. Berlin 1945 addresses the human suffering in the days of war in Berlin as both combatants and civilians stood effectively naked against the onslaught. The Wall is a visceral portrayal of humanity trapped by a historical situation. Eion will be opening a little self organised and financed exhibition with tryptics from these series for a week beginning Tuesday September 11.
'During the two recent shootings Eion took pictures both of me and my Chinese flatmate. He later photoshopped them to become a series of pictures of walls in Berlin with bullit hole traces from the second world war (Berlin stones) and, in a second series, of pictures where the remains of the Berlin wall, in their partly chopped down state, merge with our bodies. All in all I find both most remarkable.'
'Another twenty eight years have passed since the wall was mostly demolished. There are a number of sections still visible, in some cases as memorials to this time. In visiting Berlin many times over the period since that wall was demolished, I have noticed how the remaining sections started to disintegrate physically with the reinforcing metal rods now appearing at and above the surface of the concrete. The ambiguous nature of the images is reflected by the two meanings of ‘A wall to keep people in’.
Eion Johnston
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