Cate Reilly, Café Cinema & Dead Chicken Alley, Berlin Mitte, November 2024 (TRAVEL 2025)

Berlin. The still-beating heart of 1990s counter-culture. A place that is raw, edgy, continuously evolving, an unfinished product, Berlin demands to be documented in black & white. As the saying goes, “Paris is always Paris, and Berlin is never Berlin.” The images in this series are from the grungy Dead Chicken Alley, which is off Rosenthaler Straße, and the adjacent, bohemian hang-out, Café Cinema. They both look across to Apple’s flagship establishment in Berlin, which is not without a certain irony. Café Cinema, apparently, first opened just before the Wall came down. Dead Chicken Alley was, apparently, named for a defunct punk band called Dead Chickens, whose members were active in the area's underground artistic scene in the 1980s to 2000s. It’s now home to a regularly changing gallery of street art, peeling bill posters, and graffiti, as well as a couple of museums, cafés and bars, and an art vending machine, Wunstkunst, where (apparently) you can purchase a random artwork. At the time we were there, the price was €6. So very Berlin.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.