Tourist snapshots are the quintessential embodiment of our belief in the objectivity of photography: they confirm that the photographed subject was present on a certain place at the moment of exposure. The place, by convention, has to be an acknowledged tourist site, socially verified as being worth visiting and, consequently, being photographed. Such snapshots, thus, display evidence of one’s acquired experience, or, as Susan Sontag put it, present trophies which, once they enter into personal albums, play a significant role in family histories.

Travelling today is unthinkable without the act of taking pictures of ourselves on the sites we have previously seen on television, in the Internet or in travel books. These snapshots are the means by which we construct our “touristic” experience. Yet, the choice of sites is rarely a result of personal interest – it is, in most cases, a closely followed itinerary dictated by the most popular tourist guides.  

The average cultural tourist comes back from his journey with images which serve as evidence of his “having been” at the places of historical importance, in which various buildings and monument fulfill the function of a fitting backdrop. Unwittingly, his collection of images presents a fragmentary narrative of a city which could also be read against the grain, as a palimsest of various historical layers, ancient and modern conflicting stories and developments more or less visible in the traces they left in the urban structure.

By assuming the ready-made identity of a cultural tourist I construct a narrative of my Berlin experience. My starting point was a tourist guide “DDR Reisebuch” which was published in Leipzig in 1986 with its list of important sites in what was then East Berlin. I enlarged this list by adding several sites from the former West Berlin whose historical context I find important for the city.