Charlottenburger Chaussee 109
13597 Berlin
030 3325772
marian@ich.ms
Photographs from the 1980s by Mahmoud Dabdoub
Mahmoud Dabdoub's photographs are everyday and street photographs of a world that no longer exists today. Dabdoub came to the GDR from Lebanon in 1981 and studied photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In the following five years he shot around 1,500 films.
Image gallery
Alltag in der DDR , 1985, Im Zug von Berlin nach Leipzig
His snapshots are characterized by the immediacy of the observation of everyday events. The surprising motifs often put people in the foreground. Mountains of tires and children playing, joy of life and decaying old buildings, holiday scenes and hard work document the world of life in the GDR from an intimate perspective.
Mahmoud Dabdoub was born into a Palestinian family in Lebanon in 1958. From his first year of study, his photographs were shown in exhibitions. In 1988, his diploma exhibition from Leipzig was also shown in Cologne. As a foreign student, he was able to cross the border from the GDR to the West.
Mahmoud Dabdoub has been working as a freelance photographer since 1988, and further exhibitions at home and abroad followed. In 2003 he published a first volume of photographs from his student years under the title "Everyday Life in the GDR". The second volume was published under the same title in June 2024.
