A black-and-white photo at a museum in Dortmund stopped Maria Korhanidou-Kramer in her tracks. She looked at the image o...

A black-and-white photo at a museum in Dortmund stopped Maria Korhanidou-Kramer in her tracks. She looked at the image of a group of elementary school children and immediately recognized herself, around 9 or 10 years old. "As soon as I saw the photo, I said, 'that's me,'" she told Kathimerini. She hadn't even known the photo existed. The image is part of a new exhibition at the Hoesch-Museum in Dortmund documenting the Greek community there during the 1970s. The photos were taken in 1976 by two young German photographers, Jurgen Spieler and Thomas Strenge, then both in their early twenties, commissioned to document Greek youth in the city during Dortmund's "Days of Foreign Culture" festival. At the time, roughly 5,000 Greeks were living in Dortmund, drawn by the city's steel factories and industrial plants, mostly arriving from northern Greece during the 1960s. Spieler and Strenge spent three months embedded with families, visiting schools, playgrounds, and Orthodox community gatherings. They eventually handed cameras to the young people themselves, including children on playgrounds, forming a small group of Greek, Turkish, and German youth. About 300 images came from the participants alone, making up roughly a third of the total project. The exhibition nearly never happened. When city officials first saw the photos in 1976, they rejected them as too bleak and too close to reality, not wanting to show Greek diplomatic guests the actual living conditions of migrant workers. The photos were pulled from the official program and shown instead in a stairwell. After the local press pushed back, publishing a headline that read, "The official representatives didn't recognize their own city," the photos were shown again three months later in a proper gallery, this time with the mayor and a representative from the Greek consulate present. The two photographers weren't invited. Nearly four decades later, museum director Isolde Paroussel stumbled on the original project while researching a migration exhibition. Spieler told her the negatives still existed. The current exhibition, revisiting the project 50 years on, has so far allowed at least 106 people to be identif...