Kleinstadt is not a vague term in German but a defined one: according to the Imperial Office of Statistics in 1887, a definition still valid in Germany today, a small town has between five and twenty thousand inhabitants. Ute and Werner Mahler took that bureaucratic definition as the frame for their photographic project. Starting in 2012, they drove around Germany in a small car with a large camera and a supply of black-and-white sheet film, photographing empty squares, the very old and the very young who remain, closed shopfronts and the slow decay of provincial centres. The images come from many different small towns, from Bad Gandersheim to Lebach and Zörbig, so that no single place becomes the book’s protagonist; instead a composite picture emerges.
The 144-page volume contains 69 duotone plates, and its register is deliberately restrained. Where a documentary project might press an argument about decline, these pictures let architecture, distance and posture carry it, and the accumulation across the sequence matters more than any individual frame. The large format is itself an attitude: it slows the making of each image and gives façades, streets and faces an exactness that suits the project’s patience. Florian Lamm’s design, the linen cover with foil-stamped lettering and the 26 × 32 cm format keep the pictures in a measured, almost archival presentation.
The book includes text by both photographers, published in German and English. Within their serial practice, it is a further chapter in a sustained inquiry into the edges of German life, following Monalisen der Vorstädte, Wo die Welt zu Ende war and seltsame Tage. The pictures were shown at the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Halle (Saale) in 2018. The question running through the book—who is here when I am not here, and why—is not answered so much as held open.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in its place within the Mahlers’ serial practice and in the clarity with which it defines that practice: a photographer couple working in black-and-white on a subject that, by the book’s own account, is likely to be decided one way or another in the coming years.
