Photo Exhibit Tears Down That Wall

A woman standing with a girl on a crowded street, the girl with her arms around the woman. Two kids on rafts in what looks like a canal, viewed through wire mesh. A row of columns holding up a portico, the last one crumbling, a soldier peeking out from the space in between the stonework. A child with a stick and a toy car striding by a sign that suddenly places us in history.

“You are entering the American sector. Carrying weapons off duty forbidden. Obey traffic laws,” the sign reads. The instructions are repeated again, in Russian and French. The last line is in German. The German text makes no mention of weapons or traffic laws, as if the Berliners reading it don’t need to be reminded.

Or is that the right interpretation? What does the omission mean?

When I visited Kehler Liddell recently to see photographer Sven Martson’s exhibition ​“Taking Sides: Berlin and the Wall, 1974,” — running through Oct. 7 and featuring Martson’s pictures from the city that was, at that time, cut in half by the uneasy tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union — I struck up a conversation with someone else in the gallery. We shared our admiration for the images, for their glimpse into the divided Berlin that’s still one of the most potent symbols of the Cold War for anyone old enough to remember it.

Then something interesting happened. The other visitor talked about how everyone in the pictures seemed nervous to her. They didn’t seem nervous to me, exactly, but I agreed something was going on.

“They look like they’re waiting for something,” I said.

But that was not Martson’s own experience when he visited Berlin in 1974 to document what was happening on both sides of its famous wall. His own parents had been driven westward by Russian expansion a generation before and ultimately emigrated to the United States. They were not allowed to return.

“Of course I had a negative bias toward anything associated with the eastern side of the Curtain,” Martson said. As a young adult picking a subject for a series of photographs, ​“I chose Berlin because it was a concentrated symbol of what had happened to my family.”

As an American in 1974, he was allowed to cross freely between the western and eastern halves of the city. (“That was allowed on account of they wanted dollars. As much as possible they tried to get Western currency,” Martson said.) He expected to see stark contrasts: the relative opulence of the West versus the hardships of the East, freedom versus repression. When he got there, he did see some differences —“in the way architecture was put up, and public facilities, and the way people dressed,” he said. But for the most part, he learned fast that his preconceptions were wrong.

“It fell apart almost the first day,” Martson said. In moving back and forth between West and East Berlin, he noticed mostly similarities. People ​“all got up and did the same things. They went to work and went to bed.” He visited relatives in East Germany, and found that their lives were ​“not so very different.”

So he tossed aside his preconceptions and did what he had traveled to Berlin to do: take pictures.

“I was just looking at people as they walked by me in the street,” Martson said. ​“I carry a camera with me all the time, and I take picture when something interests me.”

He did that on both sides of the Berlin Wall — which became part of the point of the exhibit.

“I purposefully didn’t put wall labels up, because I didn’t want people to know what side the pictures were taken on,” Martson said. In the exhibit, there is a roughly even split between photos from West Berlin and photos from East Berlin, and ​“it’s a challenge to say which side of the wall they’re on.” In an early walk-through of the show, he asked people to guess. ​“Nobody got any more than 50 percent.”

But Martson’s photography isn’t just the product of a roving eye. Putting images of Berlin in 1974 up now struck Martson as ​“a good mirror — a good reflex to take a look at long ago when people thought of walls as a solution to things.” Think the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall, designed and built to keep out invaders to no avail. It’s also fair to think of walls far more current — the wall between Israel and Palestine, the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico (which in many places already existed, and existed before the Trump administration).

“We tend to forget that these things just don’t work,” Martson said. ​“Why do we do them at all, instead of building bridges?”

Though Martson’s politics aren’t the sole message of his images. ​“Above all, I like to think of my work as art,” he said — art that frames broader questions than the ones in the headlines, and maybe offers ways forward beyond political mechanisms. We may bring our own ideas to a photo exhibit about Berlin in the 1970s, about the Cold War, about the lines we make that divide us. Martson’s photographs confound and complicate those ideas. It’s more complicated than we think, and at the same time, simpler: people getting up in the morning, doing what they do, and going to bed, just like we do.

“Taking Sides” runs at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through Oct. 7. Visit KLG’s website for hours and more information.