On a spring day in 2014, photographer Janina Wick cycled from Berlin-Kreuzberg to Wuhlheide. Behind Treptower Park, she followed the Spree over a bridge - and suddenly found herself in an area she did not know yet: Schoneweide. Everywhere dilapidated industrial buildings from the Wilhelminian era, wild fallow land. Wick was fascinated.
For some time now, she has been studying the question of how young people move in urban areas. Which places do you choose to meet, how do you take them? In Schöneweide, in the middle of nowhere, Wick found answers to her questions - because she met young people.
In Schoneweide, on a fallow land, they stopped. Near a ship that houses a youth club, photographer Wick also met many young men and women.
For most of them, these places were refuge in Schöneweide, Wick found. Many have problems with their parents or the school. At the same time there is also a great cohesion, in case of difficulties, the young people are there for each other. Almost all of them have always lived in Schöneweide. "Everyone here knows everyone, like in a small town," says the photographer.
For four years, from 2014 to 2018, she made contact with the young and visited her again and again. Together, they explored the vacant land of the fallow. Wick was impressed by the wild nature, the atmosphere. She let the young people show even more places where they meet and who mean something to them. There are places where nothing is going on, where they are undisturbed.
Wick always carried her camera with her. She pulled the trigger when the teenagers showed her how to sit on the Spree. How to climb and hang out on rooftops. Around 80 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 met Wick, and some of them met her again and again as she walked the grounds.
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Leisure time Berliner Jugend: Teenies in NowhereThe more she came, the closer the relationship between Wick and the adolescents became. Trust was born. Wick often photographed the young people directly on the fallow ground. "If I had shown them at home or at school, they would have been much more analyzed, so they were taken out of their social world," says the photographer.
Wick gave no instructions when taking pictures, waited until the kids were just themselves. The pictures show no grin, no duckface, no poses - instead, the teens look introspective, thoughtful, vulnerable. "I'm looking for a moment in which they are completely with me and meet me as a photographer with openness.The tension that can arise in such a moment, then also in the picture is noticeable," says Wick.
In the illustrated book "Schöneweide" Wick juxtaposes portraits with images of urban and natural space. It is a book that shows the ways that the young people go to Schöneweide and a sense of their habitat: There is a path through the bushes, there is an abandoned brick building, in between the young people.
In 2017, the world changed, which caught Wick in Schöneweide with her camera: more and more empty space disappeared, new buildings emerged, people moved to. In February 2018, the fallow land was closed off and the buildings demolished to build flats. The young people were looking for other places, says Wick - in front of shopping malls or the S-Bahn station.
The disappearance should not be the subject of her work, says Wick. Only a few photos tell of the changes. Her pictures are much more of a snapshot of the past - of a place that has shaped the people depicted.
