Petrov Ahner, born in 1965, worked as a fashion and portrait photographer in Paris for 15 years from 1994, after his assistantship in Munich and Miami. The political development in France since the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, the tightening of immigration laws and the personal involvement as a foreigner led Ahner to use photography as a means of political engagement.

The gentrification and sometimes rapid changes in Berlin's reality were perceived as disillusioning. From the beginning of 2010 until its closure in September 2012, Ahner photographed everyday life and the struggle of the „Kunsthaus Tacheles" and its artists against investors as an official photographer.

On the initiative of the Italian artist and then curator of Tacheles, Barbara Fragogna, Petrov Ahner organized his first exhibitions in Berlin. In 2011, he simultaneously began the long-term project „Berlin Beauty". In it, Petrov Ahner looks for the face of his adopted home Berlin in self-portraits of its inhabitants, because people create a «look» and determine the rhythm of the capital. In addition to architecture, history, politics and landscape, they are their shaping and lively part. They are mirrors of the city, just as the city is its own.

Ahner shows the individual attempts to deal with dying and to create an everyday life in the last place of residence. The projects „Paris 26th floor", „Warschauer Brücke" or „Koinzidenzen" are photographs from the photographer's direct urban environment or, in It could be anywhere, the place of his youth in a small southern German town. The focus here is not on the documentary, but on his own perspectives, moods, and emotions. The everyday and seemingly banal is given something poetic, mysterious, and sometimes irritating.