He designed the book and struggled to find a way to print it – this was before digital presses, so it was expensive. He was around for some of mine, which ended up in my New Europe book, so there is that sweet memory of freedom and fertile youth. I was present when he took many of the images (and am in one). We were close friends and shared an apartment in Berlin, working together and roaming the city. But really it’s not about Berlin so much as a state of mind, a point of time in the walled-off city. Great images, shallow focus, details that are pointless to describe: a gate, a pipe’s shadow, a girl’s fingers. Volker Heinze’s Ahnung (Foreboding) was about Berlin in the late 1980s, when the wall was still up. Maybe it’s a reminder that these moments are meant to remain private, especially in a world where everything is now documented.įounder of online publishing house Self-Publish Be Happy. It’s just the fact that such important, intimate and private moments in growing are captured on film and widely distributed. I think what makes it such a scary read is not that anything depicted in the book is wrong (we all played doctor with our next-door neighbours). I don’t agree with any suggestion that it’s child pornography. At best, it keeps us thinking about how society has changed in terms of how we view, touch and interact with children – as parents, friends or strangers – highlighting the state of paranoia and paralysis we are in now, where all forms of intimacy and sensuality are actively repressed through fear.
The book is challenging on so many levels – exposing the limits of photography, society and our own moral boundaries. The publishers found themselves in court for six years in the US defending it, until they finally pulled its distribution, unable to afford the legal costs. Originally published as Zeig Mal! in 1974, it was developed as a sex-education book, but with explicit images of sometimes pre-pubescent children engaged in sexual acts. Show Me! by photographer Will McBride and psychoanalyst Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt had a profound effect on me.
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