Renato Silva

The End of the Line | The end of the line is a personal interpretation of Berlin’s city edges. 

I’ve been wanting to somehow do a portrait of this city for quite some time, after a couple of years of my arrival. I was not sure what or how. The city Center was not so appealing as it was extensively photographed already. So one day I had this idea of letting the trains define my Berlin borders. 

 The project was born in the Winter of 2012 with the aim to investigate and document the surroundings of the big metropolitan area of Germany’s capital. Setting this as the main goal I then decided to ride until the last stations of the main subway network, the U and S lines. These would take me sometimes really far to towns such as Strausberg or Bernau, which are mostly unfamiliar to people that live within the central area. 

Once there, I would stay hours, days or even weeks having the difficult but rewarding job of registering what in my perspective was important to build such a body of work.  The unpredictability is the big and main responsible for the next image that I was to create, turning left or right is sometimes a big and demanding question for a photographer who’s ambition is the old tradition of discovering and shooting the unknown. 

The photographic approach aims to combine the documentary with portraiture, and other visual elements collected over the course of this project. The highlights and key elements of this extensive effort are, offering alternative perspectives and reporting on these unnoted places. 

There are not many reasons to be interested in the suburban area of Berlin, maybe to start a family and buy a house, mainly because you can’t afford a bigger place in the city anymore, or it’s Summertime and people just want to go to a lake. 

My work started of pure curiosity. How does Berlin really look like? Berlin is huge and for a big part is made of little villages that came together, that’s why sometimes in some neighborhoods you have the feeling that you’re not in a city anymore. The main difference is that most of people are more open and used to foreigners as opposed to the outskirts where Berlin is not a Melting Pot anymore and prejudice and racism goes hand in hand. filhoun1co.wixsite.com/theendoftheline