Photographs by

Mark B. Anstendig

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Visits from the East to the West after the Wall was up

Sequence

Parting after Visit

These photos are, to me, miraculous. They are perfect in every way. I know of nothing else like them in photo quality or content:

This is actual real life, photographed discreetly way after midnight at the border crossing, as someone, who was only allowed to visit her mother and family in West Berlin for one day, has to leave them again forever and go back to the desolate life in East Berlin.

Everything is perfect about each and every photo. Not only is the content amazing. But each photo is state of the art for that time, and still remains unsurpassed technically even today, thanks to the Messraster Focusing Device of Joseph Dahl, which the optical /photo industries never allowed to be brought to market, ostensibly because the owner of the patent for the only totally accurate focusing device would have controlled the important optical industry (see www.anstendig.com, the papers on photography).

In every single photo of this unposed sequence, the focus is exactly on the nearest eye of the most important character in that particular photo. As the characters moved and the most important expression shifted between the characters, the focus follows precisely. And it is exactly this placement of the sharpest plane of focus on the most important subject point that gives this series its indelible and absolutely accurate expressive content.

East-West Visits Index

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