Berlin Stories: artist Ed Broner’s trip through the party city with a camera

Volume Two plunges headlong into life: specifically, Ed Broner’s nightlife, which is presented in a kind of photo album-cum-journal. The photographer and artist, who usually spends his time painting large, very colourful canvases, has reduced his visual vocabulary to a democratic black-and-white.

The brilliant lights of clubs, their outlandish guests, other artists in their studios, eccentric old cars, nude girls, amusing graffiti—everything is equal here in this very personal narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, of macho guys and celebrities, and the façades of buildings and people. It's a cynical, atmospherically intoxicating commentary on the desire for an addiction to pleasure, the presentation of luxury labels, and a selfie culture in love with details.

“Vagabondage Diary is a very personal depiction of sex, drugs, and art—of violence and hidden beauty, a journey through all the walks of life that evade straightforward categorisation, a life full of opposing contrasts and contradictions that happen to make up our post-modern existence,” writes the philosopher Philipp Hübl in the book’s afterword.

Berlin Stories 2: Ed Broner. Vagabondage Diary is published by Hatje Cantz and available for €20, available in both German and English.