»Photography is my work - watercolors are my pearls.«

Habermann, now 89, was born in Berlin in June 1933 and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After his parents were forced to abandon their shoe store in Berlin Mitte after the Nazis came to power, the family, who were Jewish, managed to flee to Palestine in 1939. Habermann trained there as a technical draftsman, experienced the founding of the State of Israel and shortly afterwards completed his military service as a technical draftsman in the Israeli Air Force.

In 1957 he returned to Berlin due to a health condition of his father. What was initially only intended as a temporary stay became a life-changing decision – Habermann »got stuck in Berlin«, as he himself puts it today. He found a job as a draftsman at the Senate Department for Building and Housing, but the purchase of his first camera in 1960 was to have a much more formative influence on his future life. From then on, he captured city views of post-war Berlin and rapidly developed a unique view and striking visual language, characterized by unusual perspectives and a richly contrasting presentation of light and shadow, which is accentuated in a special way by a deliberate graininess in his black-and-white pictures.

His motifs are the architecture of Berlin as well as still life images and portraits: the traces of war on the façade of the New Synagogue, solitary cemeteries and posters half-torn from walls. Each motif is carefully chosen, or even constructed, the perspective is determined with precision. Habermann does not shy away from capturing the raw and dreary sides of the city either and although Berlin is the city from which he once had to flee with his parents, his photographs reveal the loving, embracing perspective with which he views his subjects.

in 1968, Habermann’s work became known to a wide audience for the first time with the publication of a photo of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Since then, he has considered himself a professional photographer. Numerous publications in various newspapers followed and later, exhibitions in Berlin, Tel Aviv and Chicago too, including at the Nationalgalerie Berlin in 1983.

Just as initially in the city of Berlin, later he also discovers motifs in Venice and Israel, capturing numerous still life images and developing, with The woman in the picture, a fully autonomous series of works consisting of portraits of women in front of famous paintings such as the Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Edouard Manet, with whom this series began.

Since the 1980s in particular, Habermann has also focused on watercolor painting. His constructivist motifs, almost entirely in postcard format, reflect his understanding of how to compose an image successfully. They form an independent body of work, but also help us to move closer to understanding the perspective of Habermann as a photographer.

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