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Background information
"The now world-famous photographs by Gundula SCHULZE ELDOWY (*1954) could only be created because the photographer spent several years living next door to the people portrayed, listening to them for nights on end and immersing herself in their world.
Content
In her stories in the out-of-print text and photo book 'Am fortgewehten Ort', Gundula SCHULZE ELDOWY tells how she came to Berlin as a young woman in the 1970s and first in Prenzlauer Berg, then in the Scheunenviertel, became acquainted with a milieu that still reminded her of the city of Döblin's 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'. Through her texts, we get to know figures from her later much-admired pictures - 'Ulla and Horst', for example, or 'Lothar' - better, learn a lot about her own background and gain impressions of the peculiar synthesis that the life of the East Berlin bohemians in the decaying rear buildings entered into with that of the original inhabitants." (© Lehmstedt Verlag, 2011
Reception
"The 'Berlin Stories' in the volume 'Am fortgewehten Ort' by Gundula SCHULZE ELDOWY offer the protocols to the pictures, which are much more than text notes to a great work. This is documentary literature that is resilient. In any case, you read it with bated breath, because you can clearly sense that what it says is true. The bleakness, the violence, the feeling of being at the mercy of others, which the photographer also had to experience herself. Experiences that you don't want to have shared in such unprotected conditions." (© Christian Eger, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 28.12.2011)
"In the volume 'Am fortgewehten Ort' by Gundula SCHULZE ELDOWY, which is also accompanied by photographs, the reader learns a lot about the artist's views. The questions and searches of a young person, the feeling of home in one's own certainties, the fears of loneliness, the fragility of closeness." (© Anne Hahn, Kiez-Ticker, 08.12.2011)