"An elderly lady, who has lived through all the historical events of the latter half of the twentieth century, takes a picture of her grandchild in its baby carriage near the remains of the Berlin Wall, just after its fall. Her picture is taken in turn by a photographer looking for visual relics of this epic moment. It is 1989. Photography, that other eyewitness of the 20th century, is finally free to remember, excitedly capturing momentous events in souvenir snapshots, flash bulbs exploding, cameras clicking, heralding the post-Wall era of global communication, cell phones and digital photos, of a season in which the role of the image has changed. While this photograph is black and white, what prevailed in those days was color, that of the new generation films, of a television that had replaced photojournalism in the world of information, creating a new way of delivering the news, of snapshots, nothing more and nothing less than what they are. But color was also that of the graffiti murals, first symbols of the new policies, of a desire for freedom that grew with Gorbachev's perestroika, of Florian Nenckel von Donnersmarck's and Wolfgang Becker's films, The Lives of Others, Goodbye Lenin, reflecting a new post twentieth-century humanism. And in Wenders The Sky over Berlin (Wings of Desire) color alternates with black and white when the angel abandons the sky marking the beginning of life. It is this new photography that bears witness to the fall, of what comes after the fall. For forty years photography in Berlin had been held hostage, like the city, in a ferocious heart-rending ideological struggle, a new war of representation, played out in large part via the image, still and in motion. Protagonist of the great season of photographic reportage in the democracies of the latter half of the twentieth century and instrument of propaganda in the totalitarian regimes of the East, photography narrated and incarnated the division of the two blocs. It focused on that wall built by Soviet power, the materialization of the Iron Curtain that cut through Europe, separating East from West, real socialism from consumer capitalism. This long bulwark of precast concrete four meters high crossed the city for forty kilometers, continuing for another hundred and forty, enlarged and reinforced again and again, always guarded, observed for almost thirty years by eyes on either side, object of a constant surveillance. For this is the paradox of the Wall, an obstruction for the eye, yet one on which the eye was relentlessly focused." (Uliano Lucas)