Peter Beck Photography

 

 

Checkpoint Charlie

It has been over 20 years since I was last in Germany and even then my time in Berlin was limited and mainly based around drinking and clubbing.

2016 brought an opportunity for my husband and I to exhibit the Minotaur work in a Berlin gallery and this also brought an opportunity to explore and try and get an understanding of the complex history of the city.

Of all the places we visited in our brief few days, Checkpoint Charlie was the most poignant and revealing of the period when the city was divided by opposing political ideologies represented by the wall that ran through Berlin and stood as the symbol of the Cold War division.

Checkpoint Charlie is now one of Berlin's busiest tourist locations. An open-air gallery situated along Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße tells the story of these streets and the violent madness of the cold war politics that forced people to risk everything to escape into the west. There is a solemnity as you read tragic story after tragic story and realise that these are events that have happened where you are standing and within the history of your own lifetime.

A portrait of an American soldier (by Rineke Dijkstra) now stands at the western end of the checkpoint. It serves as a reminder of a point in time before the trappings of western culture moved in to erode the history of these bloody streets. 

 

The Shard

Whilst the Shard was being built I was living in Bristol. But I visited London a number of times to go to an office just along from London Bridge. Each time I visited I somehow failed to look up and see what was being constructed above me.

Then a few years ago I moved back to London and properly looked at the Shard for the first time. It towers above anything else around it and yet I felt dissapointed because it didn't reach right up into the clouds. I guess I was expecting it to be a bit more Ballard.

I now see the Shard everday as I travel into the city for work. I have seen it in all weathers and all lights and have slowly started to full in love with it.

I took this photograph from a train window, I liked how the reflected lights resemble the tracks of the train and how they intercept the top of the tower and fill the sky.

I suspect it will appear in this blog often.

Beach Dancer

This is Beach Dancer. An image taken accidentally through the window of a beach side restaurant in Brighton.

It remains one of my favourite photoghs that I have taken myself. The fact that I was just playing around trying to capture the reflected beach front lights as a skateboarder came past is neither here nor there.