Graves at the Church of Sophia, East Berlin

A graveyard with a small number of headstones is separated from a street of apartment buildings by a brick and concrete wall. Neutral gray light bathing the scene and the large, empty side of a building situated at the center contribute to a sense of starkness. In 1991, two years after German reunification, Thomas Struth began to photograph architectural sites in the former East Germany, previously inaccessible from the West. Much of the architecture he encountered had suffered from neglect under Communist rule after World War II (1939–1945). In discovering this older graveyard, tucked away from the grid of the streets in the middle of the city, he communicated something of the complexity of the built environment and the layered history of Berlin itself.