Through the Lens: Johanna Kirsch captures Berlin’s cinematic soul

There exists a particular kind of magic in the spaces between certainty and reverie, in those moments when light surrenders to shadow and the familiar becomes utterly transformed. This is the territory Johanna Kirsch inhabits in her visual interpretation of MYKITA, a photographer whose eye has learned to trace the invisible borders between what we see and what we feel.

For the first instalment of Through the Lens, an ongoing creative series that invites photographers and artists to reimagine the MYKITA aesthetic through their own distinct sensibility, Kirsch has chosen Berlin as her canvas. The city itself becomes a collaborator: its brutalist facades and modernist angles, its streets where memory seems to linger in the air like winter fog, its particular quality of light that shifts between silver and amber depending on the hour and one’s own inner weather.

The series draws inspiration from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, that sublime meditation on observation and desire, on the act of looking itself. Here, eyewear transcends its functional purpose. The frames become vessels for perception, instruments through which we examine both the world and ourselves. As Kirsch follows Elke Biesendorf through the city’s contemplative landscape, the MYKITA pieces from the current collection sit at the intersection of two gazes: the gaze outward upon the city’s geometry and soul, and the gaze inward toward something less tangible but no less real.

There is a cinematic quality to these images, a sense of narrative unfolding across the series. The photographer’s compositions favour stillness and introspection, those quiet moments of pause that reveal character. Light becomes a protagonist, moving across skin and metal, casting shadows that seem almost as present as the forms they inhabit. The architecture of Berlin, industrial, elegant, haunted by history, mirrors the clean geometric precision of MYKITA’s design language, a shared vocabulary of refinement and intellectual clarity.

This creative undertaking speaks to something essential in contemporary luxury: the recognition that beauty is not merely consumed but experienced through the lens of individual perspective. By inviting artists such as Kirsch to interpret the brand’s aesthetic, MYKITA acknowledges that true luxury lies not in uniformity but in the space where craftsmanship meets imagination, where a product becomes a collaborator in someone else’s vision.

The series unfolds across seven images, each one a meditation on seeing, on the poetry hidden within urban form, and on the delicate way eyewear can frame not just our vision but our understanding of the world itself.

Imagery courtesy of MYKITA (@mykitaofficial).