Heyden’s photographic vision continues to fascinate us today. His photographs not only shows passersby from a bygone era but also offer a glimpse into daily life in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Heyden took portraits of the old, frail, and stranded and the merry, sad, and cheeky children who played in the broken-down neighbourhood around Prenzlauer Allee.
Bernd Heyden considers Berlin as, first and foremost, a backdrop to his life. Se started taking pictures in the mid-1960s; he joined the Club of Young Photographers in 1967, founded by Arno Fischer.