Graffiti Berlin

Leave it to New Jersey. The only place where there is still a West Berlin and an East Berlin is right here, in Camden County. I am just back from a few days vacation in the original Berlin, the one that was mostly rubble in 1945 and is now famously unified and revivified.

The Berlin of 2011 teems with young people in every area, based on my unscientific walking around. They look just like the young people here--men hip and scruffy, women who wear their beauty quite casually.

Along with the young population, it appears, comes a lot of graffiti in the more residential parts of the city. I stayed in the neighborhood known as Prenzlauer Berg, where this photo was taken. It was part of the bad old Soviet East Berlin.

Now it is, pardon the non-Jersey reference, like Brooklyn except with broader streets and sidewalks and hence more sky. The Soviet-era apartment housing doesn't even look that bad. The buildings are painted nice colors, for one thing, and then there's that graffiti, some of which--as you will see in coming Plain Sights--is artful and, I think, invited rather than invasive.

Tags: photography