vienna. berlin.
Vienna Travelgallery

Vienna and Berlin: two major European cities check each other out. Meet, blend, overlap, and are nonetheless each recognizably distinct. Or are they?

The photographers Natalie Opocensky (Vienna) and Thorsten Strasas (Berlin) create analogue double exposures in which the two cities come together in unusual photographic encounters. Roaming through their native cities, they photograph what strikes them as characteristic; then they trade the exposed films, not knowing what the other has captured. The results are like coincidental and yet typical metropolitan encounters. Sometimes evanescent, occasionally intense, but always unforeseeable.

And so Vienna and Berlin blur into each other. Seem foreign and yet profoundly familiar, arousing the beholder's curiosity and sometimes leaving him amazed. We cannot always tell whether something we see is the other city—or merely a detail from our own we were unfamiliar with. Vienna and Berlin complement, and find, each other. These unusual photographs invite us to look and recognize and, most importantly, to explore—the other city, and our own.