Yerevan 1996/1997 records Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s walks through the Armenian capital at a moment when remnants of Soviet architecture stood on the threshold of disappearance. Travelling there in 1996 and 1997 with a small portable camera, she made visual notes of man-made environments shaped by a political and social order already passing into history. The photographs attend not to spectacle but to the material presence of buildings and structures whose meanings were inseparable from their changing surroundings.

The book’s defining form emerged only after the journeys. Schulz-Dornburg developed the films on her return to Germany, then edited and compiled the prints in 2001 into a traditional notebook used in Armenian schools, purchased during one of her trips. Dedicated to her daughter Julia, who was studying architecture, this handmade sketchbook joined photographic record, personal gesture, and architectural attention in a single object.

Published by MACK in 2019, Yerevan 1996/1997 reproduces that original sketchbook as a facsimile. Its importance therefore lies not simply in the individual photographs, but in the relation between images, sequence, notebook form, and the absent or dismantled cultural artefacts they preserve. The publication carries the history of the photographed sites alongside the artist’s own actions—walking, developing, selecting, arranging, and dedicating.

For a serious collector, this is a particularly lucid example of Schulz-Dornburg’s sustained engagement with environments undergoing change, and of the artist’s-book possibilities within photographic practice. The paperback edition retains the work’s modest, intimate premise while presenting a carefully bounded record of Yerevan’s Soviet architectural remnants and the personal act through which they were assembled into memory.