Das Berlin Buch

Ben Kaila (born 1949) is a well-known documentary photographer who, along with other artists, has had a strong influence on the renewal of the means of expression in Finnish photography. His visual language is reduced and unpretentious, characterised by absolute openness and great respect for the subject in question.
Kaila fulfils the role of the stranger who, on his “language journey”, as he himself calls his way of working, draws an entire worldview.
Ben Kaila has worked as a photography lecturer, picture editor and freelance photographer. He is, among other things, a co-founder of the photography group Saftra and the alternative photo agency Gorilla.

Das Berlin Buch was created during Kaila’s numerous stays in Berlin in the 1980s and between 2010 and 2015. It contains 33 black-and-white photographs in triplex offset printing.
“Ben Kaila’s photographs do not capture a fleeting, decisive moment in the manner of the traditional snapshot. Rather, they capture a moment in which following the traces of memory has led to the discovery of what has been lost. It is the moment in which retrospection becomes introspection, in which the perception of the eye in the cerebral cortex awakens an image that has long been dormant and saves it from oblivion.”

“We see traces left by people on the pages of Das Berlin Buch, but to see them we have to squint our eyes. Ben Kaila is not an old Marie who shoots with her squeaky camera from Günter Grass's Magic Box, which conjures the deceased out of their graves in the darkroom. He strips everything unnecessary.” – Harri Haanpää