Under a grey blanket

'On the morning of 9 November 1984, at Gatwick Airport, together with a close friend, I boarded a British Airways flight to Berlin Tegel. The images that appear in the pages of this publication were taken over an eleven-day period in the divided city of Berlin. The batch of 35mm negatives from which the images came, dating from November 1984, were presumed lost, only to re-emerge in the autumn of 2019. In January 2020, using the same Olympus OM-1 SLR and Ilford FP4 film stock, I set out to produce a photographic series documenting the interior office space of the last guardhouse to stand at Checkpoint Charlie. Today, this relic of the Cold War is to be found on the outskirts of Berlin within the grounds of the Allied Museum in Zehlendorf. I had made several visits to the museum's archives over the following twelve months... which led to an invitation to organise the institution's next temporary exhibition...' Rick Buckley, Artist.