From 2012 to 2019 Mark Steinmetz took photos on the streets of Berlin. This work now comes together in the book Berlin Pictures, published by Kominek Books in 2020. The hard and soft sides of Berlin are portrayed in poetic and floating images like only Mark Steinmetz can do. What differentiates Mark Steinmetz's photographs from that of his contemporaries is the exceptional and elusive capacity to make images that are beautiful, but also compassionate. Within his images abounds a magnitude for concern that is not easily captured. Berlin is a city of ever-present ghosts. It is a city whose recent history overshadows and hangs heavily creating an indentured melancholia in which its citizens amble and toil under the gravity imposed on them from brooding grey skies and fragmented totems of history spread throughout the urban environment and yet it also offers a prodigious capacity for hope, renunciation and reconstruction.