The Photography of Gaucha Berlin

Echinacea, by Gaucha Berlin

In the movie Hit Man (funny, smart, well done, morally questionable but you end up not caring—and is that a good thing or worrisome?), the central question is whether we can change. Can someone escape what looks like their fate and reinvent themselves? Which ties to the question I have long wrestled with: what makes some people resilient, while others shatter with far less stress?

Gaucha Berlin would make a great test case.

I had asked to meet her because her photography is more than beautiful. It is gentle and honest and shows you the tiniest bits of beauty on the planet in ways you have never troubled to see them. I wondered how she learned to see nature that closely. Also I was curious about the pseudonym she uses professionally—Gaucha Berlin—and how she made her way here.

She married a St. Louis artist, I learn. A man she had fallen in love with before she ever saw his face. When she joined him here, her father informed her that St. Louis was the sister city of Stuttgart, where she was born.

Ah, good, I think, a nice, supportive family. I ask about her childhood.

“We were a happy family in the beginning,” Berlin says, and that last phrase tightens my heart. “A very lively family. My dad was a nature enthusiast, always explaining plants and animals to me and urging me to pay attention to details. We’d ramble through the woods or sit together for hours, watching deer or foxes or whatever came across. No talking. Just listening. And if our stomachs started to growl, he would pull out a little bag of gummi bears to soothe them.”

When she was seven years old, her parents divorced, and “everything broke apart.” Her idyll had ended. And her mother’s new life did not work out so well for her. She escaped the tension by going back, alone, to the forest that surrounded their village. “After school, I just left with my little bicycle to explore. I had gotten my first camera from my dad: a Kodak, just a rectangle, and you could flip open the lid….”

She also took after-school lessons in gymnastics (loved it) and the accordion (not so much). Riding from one end of the village to the other gave her plenty of freedom and photo ops—and sometimes she stayed by the river and missed her lesson altogether. Unable to understand why she could not have her family back together, she distracted herself. When she and her sister went to summer camp through their church, she brought her camera and documented everything, even the horse that came so close the image blurred. Still, she never dreamed she would ever do photography fulltime. She figured “something with biology,” because she was fascinated by it, even when they had to buy a cow’s eye from the village butcher to dissect in class.

Eventually, Gaucha wound up with a foster family, “never feeling safe or happy. I felt like I was brought somewhere and nobody wanted me anymore.” Walking the two long-haired dachshunds she had rescued gave her an excuse to leave the house every day. “I guess I was always looking for a reason to get away,” she says. In nature, she felt herself again.

Her foster parents were followers of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian occultist and social reformer. “We grew all our own food and had a sheep and a cow—that was when I stopped eating meat, because I liked those animals so much,” she says. The life was interesting at first, because it was so far from the mainstream. But as a teenager, she started going her own way. Isolated and miserable, feeling like she belonged nowhere, she sometimes skipped out of school at noon and used her lunch money to buy a peppermint tea at a coffeehouse. She made that tea last three hours while she watched a cool group of young adults play backgammon. They took her into their circle, and they taught her things no one had ever bothered to teach her. She started counting—first in years, then in months—how long she had to wait until she turned eighteen.

When one of her friends left to study graphic arts, she tried to figure out what that even was. As a child, she had painted and played with all sorts of crafts. Now it dawned on her that art might be a deeper interest. The following year, at seventeen, she met her first real boyfriend. When he told her he was leaving for Berlin to study, she sounded out the city’s name slowly—she had heard it before but knew nothing about the place. “I’m coming with you,” she said impulsively. She did some research and learned of a private school, Lette Verein Berlin, for graphic design, photography, and fashion design. She could be accepted without Germany’s version of a high school diploma.

Her father, who kept up with her life through her foster mother, wanted her to study business. “Which was for me so boring,” she groans, “and was also not my talent.” She filled out a written application for the art school and was invited to Berlin to take a three-day test.

Her boyfriend drove her, and she sailed through the test, making collages, doing perspective drawings, sketching nudes. She was accepted, one of thirty in an applicant pool of more than four hundred. She stopped going to high school altogether. On her eighteenth birthday, she asked for her passport, picked up the suitcase she had already packed, and left for Berlin.

Her father was not amused, but there was little he could do.

“That was the beginning,” she says, “of how I am right now.” She had grown up wary, unwilling to trust anyone, unwilling to hope that everything would be all right. But by taking one risk after another, she opened up her world.

Coreopsis, by Gaucha Berlin

“The relationship with my boyfriend didn’t last, but it got me to Berlin, and that was the best choice I’ve ever made,” she says. “Once my dad realized I was serious and I’d work hard and finish the schooling, he started to develop a real friendship with me.”

She found a series of offbeat, arty jobs that would pay the rent. She had moved to Berlin two weeks after the Wall came down, and the streets were jammed with excited East Germans lined up to buy food and Sony Walkmen. They wore cheap jeans, not Levis, and smelled like the coal they used to heat their houses, but they were so happy.

At the art school, Berlin loved design but was magnetized by photography. You could capture something with a camera. Hold it as your own. Belong to it.

Shy about photographing people, she shot landscapes and cityscapes hungrily, eager to preserve everything she saw. When she and her classmates finished their graphic design program in 1993, they were released into a city with precious few job openings. She applied at an ad agency in a dank basement, where a guy “in a shiny shirt” told her she would have to dress differently (she was wearing her usual jeans, boots, and leather jacket). “That’s all the money you’re offering, and you want me to buy clothes from that?” she retorted.

Instead, she took a job at a secondhand store with cult status. “Everything was crammed in, and I gave it a new appearance, started decorating the windows, tripled the revenue. People started coming to Berlin just to go to this store.” Six months later, a friend traveled to Capetown and wrote her, “This is your city. Come.”

“And that,” she says, “was the beginning of living my own real life.”

She fell in love with the light in South Africa, the strong mix of cultures, the creativity in every realm of life. When the ANC won the elections, she rejoiced; she had marched with them for Nelson Mandela. “There was apartheid when I arrived,” she says, “and I saw the transformation, just like in Berlin. Once again, the whole city was all of a sudden full of joy.”

She was tempted to settle in Capetown, but she kept traveling: Botswana, Namibia, all over Europe, Thailand, Laos, Burma, South America, shooting everywhere she went: old cars, architecture, desert, mountains. She stayed a while in Uruguay, where she had a chance to ride with the gauchos and found her new name. “They move with their cows,” she explains, “so I made that big circle with them, sleeping at a campfire, swimming in the ocean.”

Eventually she met—on MySpace—an artist named Langley. She loved his work and sent a friend request. “I didn’t know what he looked like, but I really liked his words,” she says. “I understood everything he said; intellectually, we were on the same wavelength.” In time, she suggested a phone call, saying, “I want to know how you sound.”

He was in St. Louis; she was in Berlin. They talked for three hours, laughing most of the time. Eager to at least see the U.S. if the romance fizzled, Berlin flew here, arriving on February 14 without a clue to the date’s significance. Now Langley tells people his love showed up on Valentine’s Day.

Arugula, by Gaucha Berlin. She prints her soft-focus images on heavy archival Hahnemühle paper, made in Germany since 1584.

We talk more about her travels, how braving the world as a backpacker built her confidence, teaching her to trust herself and others. “To some people it sounds fascinating, but it’s also exhausting,” she adds. “I often had the desire to just have a normal family, with a mom and dad like everybody else’s. I had to learn to use both elbows to find my way.”

As an adult, she deepened her relationship with her father, realizing how broken he was in those years after the divorce. He was interested to hear about her travels; he, too, had roamed the world when he was young, taking photographs as he went.

Now she translates his love of nature and image by making tight, macro-lens portraits of, say, a dead rose in winter, or the seed pod of a clematis vine. “My husband says I’ve turned into a botanist,” she says, laughing. “I research every flower. I’m looking for its meanings, and science, and poetry. I’m trying to capture the world hidden underneath.”

At art fairs, photography buffs sometimes tell her she has “a weird crop” (she does not crop) or ask how she Photoshopped a background (she did not). She might use Photoshop to clean up an image or dehaze it, but for her backgrounds, she maneuvers to find the right angle and a color that works, even if it comes from a truck parked nearby. A shallow depth of field then blurs it into the perfect backdrop.

“It’s mainly men who want to argue about technical stuff,” she remarks. “To me, nothing is more boring. “What was the setting? What was your aperture? I can’t remember! I’m taking thousands of photos. I know my craft, but I’m constantly experimenting with it.”

Mischief quirks her upper lip: “I like to make them a little bit mad. I say, ‘I’m taking the photos with my belly feeling.’” Gut feeling, I translate for myself. “This is about capturing the character or mood, not winning a championship for technicalities. They think every photo needs to be needle sharp, but I have my own rules.” Her technique changes with her subject. For her flower portraits, she goes a little abstract, doing hand-held macrophotography in natural light. It takes patience: even a slight breeze can threaten her intentions. But the result is often so painterly, the petals could be glazed in oil.

“People tell me, ‘I never looked at that flower that way,’” she says, delighted.

She set out alone to explore the world, and she learned to see it fresh.