In 1987 and 1988, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler traveled twice from East Berlin to Lisbon with the writer Wolfgang Kil. The fruit of those trips was to have been a book for the Leipzig publisher Brockhaus; instead, the project collapsed in 1989, and the negatives and contact sheets went into gray boxes in a Brandenburg archive, where they remained until 2021. Hartmann Books now publishes the photographs the Mahlers made on those two visits.

Lisbon was in fact their first joint project, undertaken long before they consciously began to author work together. The shared manner that later distinguishes Monalises of the Suburbs, Strange Days, Small Town, and Streams is already legible here: black-and-white street photography made on foot, alert to gesture, threshold, and the ordinary texture of a foreign city. What the East German travelers could not have anticipated is how those negatives would read a generation later, when the Lisbon they recorded had itself become historical.

Wolfgang Kil’s accompanying text was written for the original, unpublished book; the present volume sets it beside the pictures at a modest 16 by 21.2 centimeters, clothbound and embossed, in German and English. Florian Lamm designed and laid out the book, and the care of that work is evident in its sequencing and proportions. Such a text is not a substitute for the photographs, but it restores the collaborative premise on which the project began.

For a collector, the significance lies less in scarcity than in position: this is the earliest evidence of a photographic partnership that would define two distinguished careers, recovered from an archive and given a considered form by a publisher attentive to the material. It belongs wherever the Mahlers’ later books are shelved — as their prologue, and as a record of a city seen from the other side of a wall that would soon come down.