Artist’s + Curator’s Tour

Together with Laura Benz, who co-curated the exhibition and has taken care of his archive in recent years, Harald Hauswald gives insights into the works on display and the stories behind them. In this special guided tour you will learn more about the conception of the exhibition and the conservation of Harald Hauswald's work.

As a co-founder of the photographers’ agency OSTKREUZ, Hauswald is one of the most important figures in German photography. In recent years, over 7,500 of his negatives have been conserved and digitalized by the Ostkreuz Association for Photography, supported by a major grant from the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. The images shown in Harald Hauswald . Voll das Leben! Reloaded are invaluable as visual documents of East and West German history.

Harald Hauswald (b. 1954 in Radebeul, Saxony) is one of the most eminent East German photographers. Together with Sibylle Bergemann, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, and others, he founded OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen, a photographer-run agency. After completing a traineeship to become a photographer, Hauswald moved to East Berlin in 1978, where he worked as a telegram carrier in Prenzlauer Berg and for the Stephanus Foundation, among other jobs. From the early 1980s, he regularly published photo-essays in West German periodicals including GEO, Stern, Zitty, and taz, at first using a pseudonym and later under his own name. His work has been shown in over 250 solo exhibitions across Germany, the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and has been published in diverse publications on East Berlin and everyday life in the GDR. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1997) and the Einheitspreis – Bürgerpreis zur Deutschen Einheit (Citizens’ Award for German Unity, 2006). Harald Hauswald lives and works in Berlin.

Laura Benz, born 1986 in Heidelberg. After studying art history at the University of Hamburg, she has worked on various exhibition and publication projects in the field of photography, since 2015 for Ostkreuz - Agentur der Fotografen. From 2018-2021 she led the project of archiving and digitizing Harald Hauswald's negative stock.