Yero Adugna Eticha
Image credit: BLACK IN BERLIN, NOELLA © Yero Adugna Eticha
It began some fifteen years ago with a deceptively simple idea: Yero Adugna Eticha sought to render Black life visible in Germany. Then, in 2020, the contours of the project emerged, when some 15,000 people filled the streets of Berlin in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Confronted with the scope of the city’s Black community, Eticha distributed thousands of postcards inviting people to his studio.
The result is an extraordinary archive: more than 500 black-and-white portraits; around 40 are now presented in this Emerging Berlin exhibition.
With Black in Berlin, on view from 17 September to 10 November 2025 at Fotografiska Berlin, Eticha challenges reductive stereotypes, fosters intimacy, and illuminates diasporic identity — a quiet manifesto against the homogenizing gaze of majority culture. Most of those portrayed grew up in Germany. Within the exhibition, these lived experiences are brought into view, presenting Blackness in Germany not solely as struggle but in its multiplicity.