In 1979 Joachim Brohm photographed thirty-five allotment sheds in Germany’s Ruhr valley. The series is among his earliest, and it predates the reputation he built over the following decade as one of the first photographers in Europe to work exclusively in colour.

The sheds resist generalisation. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler’s accompanying text observes that no two are alike: a plain wooden barrack here, a bungalow trimmed like an excursion steamer there; meticulous detail in one place answered by careless ornament in another. Each structure records a sequence of decisions — materials hauled in, walls laid, joints sealed and glued, a predecessor’s hut enlarged, a larger window fitted afterwards, an antenna bolted to the roof. They sit somewhere between tool shed and dacha, gingerbread house and orangery.

The title acknowledges Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, and Brohm was also looking at William Eggleston and Robert Adams. The subject, though, is not industrial structure but garden architecture and the human activity it registers, photographed in colour at a moment when colour was still an argument in European photography.

MACK published the book in July 2014: 104 pages, thirty-five plates, 27 × 25 cm, debossed vinyl hardcover, with text in English and German. For a collector, its interest lies in chronology and in position. These are early pictures by a photographer who has taught at Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts since 1993, made before that standing existed, and they show what a typological method looks like when it turns toward the vernacular and lets colour carry the evidence.