Occupation: Structures of the Berlin Brigade
A Visual Anthropology Research Project on the Built Environment

A politically and culturally conscious approach to urban preservation and development considers public memory and space as a cultural product. This comprehensive visual anthropology addresses how individuals relate to heritage sites over time and political change to offers insight for urban development and heritage management projects.

This photographic project deals with a set of buildings in the former American Sector of West Berlin. These political structures were used or built by the US occupational military following WWII, the Cold War, German reunification, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (1945 – 1994). The sites share a unique historical context and geographic proximity, lending themselves to place-making research.

As the 30th anniversary of the occupational withdrawal of foreign military from Berlin is commemorated in 2024, I am revisiting this project produced as a masters research at the Freie Universität Berlin. Gathering the experiences, ideals, and powers implicated at these sites across evolving eras, circumstance and purpose expand our perception of what buildings have meant and continue to mean individually and collectively.

Mike Terry is a photographer and visual anthropologist based in the New England Region.

He earned a B.A. in Mass Communication from the University of Utah in 2010 and was awarded A Fine Art, Music, Architecture and Dance Graduate scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD) in 2011 through which he earned a Masters in visual and media anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Mike has worked as a photographer and filmmaker for commercial and editorial clients internationally.

Since 2014 he has lectured at the Freie University Berlin and the Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft in Berlin where He developed the masters course 'Space & Place'. From 2017-18 he taught reportage and portrait photography at the F16 Schule für Fotografie in Berlin.

Before relocating to Australia in 2020, he worked as a visual & online producer for the studio of filmmaker Yulia Mahr and the classical composer Max Richter in the United kingdom. Currently, in addition to working as a freelance photographer and filmmaker he is Communications Leader for the School of Environment and Rural Science's International Capacity Building Group at the University of New England.

Image: Teufelsberg, Berlin-Grunewald. Former US/British listening station. 2013 / 1985