Photos of friends, lovers and afters in Berlin’s party scene
Dreams and How to Keep Them – Vincent Wechselberger’s new monograph documents a decade of hedonism in the German capital, and the people he met along the way.
Vincent Wechselberger jogs up to me, one hand outstretched to hug and the other holding 10 years of his life in photos. The photographer first began taking pictures seriously at 18, when he arrived in Berlin from a rural village in the Netherlands and started capturing the clubrats and sex workers who shaped his experience of the city. Now, he’s collated a decade’s worth of this work in his new photobook, Dreams and How to Keep Them. When I open it up, it feels a lot like our first interaction: part-hug, part-display.
The photobook is a love letter to Berlin and its night owls. Vincent and his friends roll around in the dusty-pink hours of the morning, breakfast is served with a line, and kisses are tucked away in dark corners. But Vincent never planned to stay in the city, much less fall for it. “I started dreaming about Berlin while already being in Berlin,” he says. “It’s the city where I grew into myself, where I became an adult.”
Vincent explains much of this happened during the pandemic, when Germany’s hard lockdown pushed Berlin’s parties behind closed doors. While clubbers waited for Berlin’s Tanzverbot (dance ban) to be lifted, Vincent captured their restlessness and found his identity as an artist.
“It was an era where people just lost themselves in the city. And I did too, because there was nothing to do and no boundaries anymore,” he says. “We were like 40 people in an apartment for the weekend and we danced and took drugs and partied, but we got to know each other on a very deep level and I got to take great portraits of them. That’s when people started to see me as a photographer.”
But the book only grazes the stereotype of Berlin as a hedonistic haven. In fact, very few photos are taken on dancefloors. Instead, Vincent takes us straight to the afterparty – the whispered debrief between tired clubgoers. The photos are sensitive, featuring intimate portraits of Vincent’s loved ones, often bathed in soft lighting and captured in quiet moments.
“Most of the photos are unstaged snapshots. I like to work with my point-and-shoot camera so it’s really fast. It has a documentary touch to it,” he says.
Read next: The British intimacy of ‘the afters’
It’s an approach that can immortalise a friend’s fleeting smiles and quirks, but Vincent is also aware of the tensions that photographing can create in private spaces. In Berlin, most nightclubs do not permit photography of any kind, for fear that documentation can hinder the freedom people feel in private.
“I photograph less and less during events with my friends, because often I feel like the camera takes away the realness – people are suddenly aware that I’m there with my camera. The best shots are the ones I didn’t take because I didn’t want to destroy the real moment.”
It’s why beds and bedrooms feature so heavily across his work. Vincent’s subjects return time and time again to the shelter of a duvet, and his ‘favourite bed’ even stars in multiple photos.
“I don’t feel so safe taking photos outside on the street,” he says. “In bedrooms, it’s so intimate and so quiet. There’s a feeling of safety in me and the people I’m photographing.”
The bedroom is not only an assurance of safety in Vincent’s work, but a hideaway from the political uncertainty of Berlin. In a city wrestling with the rise of the far-right “some take to the streets, others retreat to kitchens, bedrooms and bodies,” as Vincent writes in the book’s afterword.
As the photographer turns the page on 10 turbulent years in Berlin, one might be inclined to ask if the dream-chasing has ended. But, as he plans to spend more time balancing family and work, he sees homecoming the same way he sees his beds: “In a good bedroom, in a really beautiful bedroom, you can rest so well and then you can continue to chase.”
Dreams and How to Keep Them by Vincent Wechselberger published by SMUT Press.
Hannah Mildner is a freelance journalist.
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