The group exhibition Streets of New York tells the personal New York stories of the four Berlin photographers and takes the viewers on a visual journey through time from 1979 to 2023. In the style of street photography, the four photo artists document and compare the role of New York and its economic, social and societal changes over the decades. The black-and-white and colour photographs show the New York of the little people, the people in the streets of Manhattan, the everyday life of New Yorkers and also give a glimpse of New York as a melting pot for generations of immigrants. The exhibition documents formative events and reports on inspiring encounters from a city that has changed dramatically between 1979 and 2023 - but has often remained true to itself. It thus provides an interesting comparison across the different eras and offers a deep insight into the reality of life in New York of the years past and present.

Andreas Weigelt shows the wild New York of the years 1979-1984 in colour Xeroxes, prints of colour slides and black-and-white photographs - initially still unclouded by the AIDS epidemic. As a Fulbright scholar he studied experimental theatre at NYU and financed his degree with theatre and photo jobs, e.g. for the YMCAs and the Goethe House. His photos are characterised by life in several neighbourhoods: Thompson Street in Little Italy, St. Marks Place, "America's most fascinating street" (Karen Abbott), Clinton Street, then no man's land - two houses down from Robert Mapplethorpe and Patty Smith, East 71st, lived as illegal lodgers of Magda Gabor. In between, trips to Coney Island or escapes from hot summer nights to the upper deck of the Staten Island Ferry or Studio 54. The photos show people he met, such as Erwin Piscator's widow Maria, Judith Malina (Living Theatre), Quentin Crisp, the most famous homosexual in the world - known through Sting's 'Englishman in New York'.

The New York of 1990 that Jörg Rubbert documents was still the New York before 11 September. At the beginning of the nineties, New York was regarded as a city of extremes: million-dollar business on Wall Street on the one hand, frighteningly increasing street crime on the other. New York became a symbol of urban decay in the USA. It was the New York of the Dinkins era, the first black mayor of a major American city. Violent protests and race riots had already broken out in the summer of 1989, and by April 1990 the tension had reached a peak. In this explosive atmosphere, Dinkins succeeded in pacifying the city with his message to New Yorkers that "there is more hope in this city than there are street corners". Rubbert's interest is above all in the little people, the immigrants and people from lower social classes. He documents their daily struggle for perspective and social recognition, in short: their realisation of the American dream.

The pictures by Ingrid Henke are from 2014. In New York, all ethnic groups meet as a matter of course - on the street, in the underground, at work - a dazzling mosaic picture. Everyone comes from somewhere: My ancestors came from England, my father from Germany, my mother from China, my grandparents are from India, from Mexico and originally, involuntarily, many from Africa. Many new immigrants, especially from Mexico and South America, initially live in the New World as illegal immigrants. The different ethnic groups keep their cohesion, their own cultural accent and live in their neighbourhoods. The second generation feels, no, is American, sees itself as part of the American nation. Chaos and glamour are close together. Ingrid Henke has photographed faces of New York. Her interest in America, the Americans and their culture arose for very private reasons: As a teenager, she fell in love with an American travelling through Europe.

The latest images are from Jürgen Bürgin's stay in New York in 2023. Bürgin is strolling through Bushwick, once a run-down neighbourhood in northern Brooklyn, now plagued by gentrification and rapidly rising rents. He attends the Easter Parade, that strangely out-of-time parade to welcome spring on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, for which people have dressed up, donned fine threads and worn splendid hats once a year since the 19th century. And he observes a horse race in Queens at a place that has been past its prime for decades, the fabled Aqueduct Race Track, which looks back on a tradition of almost 130 years. Bürgin's images carry the melancholy of a city that, after the pandemic and after the Trump presidency, which many New Yorkers find traumatic, is only just rediscovering its lightness of years past.

Exhibitions in Germany