I’m a photographer from Brazil, based in Berlin. I’m attached to this city since 5 years and I have been trying it out from top to bottom, from inside out. Here are some of my personal highlights.
A very good reason to travel West: the C/O, next to the formerly infamous Berliner Zoo tube station, is an awesome museum dedicated to photography and visual media. Previous exhibitions include Larry Clark, Martin Parr, Anton Corbijn, Annie Leibovitz and Stephen Shore.
This museum of photography is really great, and the highlight for me after the inspiring exhibitions is the good coffee and great cakes at their coffee place.
I find myself there almost every second week for a drink and a slice of cake. The food is perfect, the ambiance is nice and it's really alive as a lot of people are coming directly from the running exhibition. At the entrance you can find an interesting bookstore and the best photoautomat of the city right outside.
Last but not least, it's only some meters from the Helmut Newton Fondation ( which doesn't have a nice coffee place itself yet ).
It is the highest place in Berlin and is made of wartrash. Translated Teufelsberg means "Devils Mountain". The whole area always reminds on how beautiful Berlin is: On one side you see the big city and when you turn around pitch black forrest.
The Zoo and the Aquarium is on the things that never changed during the years. Everytime I visit it looks exactly the way when I first went when I was a little child. This place gives me a lot of inspiration, I like the way they want to make the cage enviroment look natural with artificiel light.
The central ‘Mitte’ area of Berlin is packed tight with galleries and museums, which means you can cram a lot into a short amount of time, if that’s what you want.
The best of the lot is the Me Collectors Room, which shows off large chunks of the Thomas Olbricht collection alongside other contemporary private artworks. The permanent ‘Wunderkammer’ display offers over 200 pieces from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, with a solid focus on the strange and macabre. There’s even a Mark Ryden original that fits in nicely.