Both Ends of the Room

Lisa Wassmann photographs people at the outer edges of how people present themselves—the ones who look like they’ve been awake for three days straight and the ones who’ve been professionally prepared to exist, and somehow both feel equally real in her frames. Berlin in the late 2000s was a particularly fertile environment for that kind of portrait work. The city had its own ongoing identity crisis, and the people in it were working theirs out in parallel.

She was twenty-eight and already moving comfortably between club photography for the Scala Berlin and something more deliberate in her personal and editorial work. The party images have the raw energy you’d expect—fast, close, shot in the moment—but there’s a compositional intelligence in them that most nightlife photographers never develop. The more considered portraits are their own thing: specific, unhurried, each one a small complete world.

Her portfolio is at lisawassmann.com. Looking at her work does what the best portrait photography always does—it makes you wonder what you look like when you’re not paying attention.