[...] But what does “Berlin 1989” mean to photographer Carlo Orsi? What did he seek and see in that city so far from Milan in the 1960s? Something happened in Berlin that no one could have imagined or hoped for at the time. The fall of the “wall” (but it would be more accurate to speak of demolition, destruction) marked one of the most shocking events of recent years. It was the dramatic symbol of a colossal transformation of social structures throughout the world. It was the emblem of an opening towards liberation for millions of people and the reunification of post-war Germany.

Carlo sought out and photographed images of this transformation, the figures of this collective spectacle that celebrated the end of half a century of imperial totalitarianism.

The photographs in this book, like all of Carlo Orsi's photographs, tell a story. They do not stop at the chronicle of the event, but seek, in the construction of a sequence, to capture the significant images of a single day: December 31, 1989, the last day of the year in a city that was isolated from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall. The crazy dream of that isolation had fallen, and the dream of a new generation was coming true, demolishing even the last tangible sign of war and its harmful consequences.

The photos in this book are snapshots, in the truest sense of the word.

Frozen in time, the frame becomes an emblem, a fraction of a second for the whole, a sequence of fractions of a second for a story. That almost nothing that is the five hundredth of a second manages to tell great stories. Here, History.

Paradoxically, these images do not appear as fragments. Somehow, in that infinitesimal instant, all the meaning of the people, spaces, lights, and gestures that make up that event is captured on silver.

Some of these photos resemble a theatrical performance, a big rock concert, a mammoth turn-of-the-century happening. But this impression is not misleading; in those days, what was before our eyes was not simply a historical event, its collective representation interpreted, as in a drama, the meaning of a cathartic solution, putting into figures for the world an impressive spectacular staging.

Carlo Orsi has managed to convey all this to us in his photographs. The lights and bodies, the shadows of all those people, their cries and songs, the frenzied movement of that crowd that in a few hours cauterized half a century of history.

That is a lot for a day of photographs, and this book is convincing proof of it.