Baldiga - Unlocked Heart

Synopsis

"Prostitutes, transvestites, alcoholics and the mentally ill. That's where I feel at home. That's the world that needs to be captured."

In 1979, 19-year old Jürgen Baldiga moves to Berlin and decides to become an artist. He writes poetry and keeps a diary, while working as a rent boy and cook. Faced with his mortality from an HIV infection in 1984, he discovers photography as a way to stop time and capture real moments. Between despair, longing, rebellion and an irrepressible will to survive, Baldiga becomes a chronicler of the queer West Berlin subculture, capturing friends and lovers, wild sex, street life and camp queens, up until his death in 1993.
Baldiga – Unlocked Heart is a powerful testament to a groundbreaking, sensitive and provocative photographer and AIDS activist, whose legacy is preserved through his thousands of photographs and forty diaries.

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Presented with support from Goethe-Institute Norwegen