What Germans wanted arrives at the cusp of the year 2000 as an act of institutional self-examination. Brought out by Hatje Cantz in 1999, this German-language hardcover runs to 541 pages and pairs an emphatic English main title with an explanatory subtitle: thirty years of photography in Germany, thirty years of the BFF. The initials belong to the Bund Freischaffender Foto-Designer, Germany’s association of independent photo-designers, and that association supplies both the frame and the occasion for the survey.
Edited by Francesco Bonami, the volume carries critical contributions by Guy Tortosa and Sigrid Hauser alongside a dedicated body of photographic work by Walter Niedermayr. The structural placement of Niedermayr’s images within an anniversary retrospective suggests a deliberate dialogue between individual authorship and collective history; the photographs neither float as detached plates nor dissolve into documentation, but sit where personal vision and professional biography meet.
In scale, the book belongs to the genre of the institutional reference: published in the year that closed the BFF’s third decade, it preserves a moment when German photography was reconsidering its own identities, its divisions between the artistic and the applied, and the changing conditions under which freelancers worked. By making the association rather than the gallery the central protagonist, the editors offer collectors a valuable counterpoint to the familiar sequence of monographic portfolios.
For the serious collector, the significance is documentary as much as visual. A carefully compiled record of three decades and of an organisation’s anniversary, with a substantial page count and the collaboration of editor, essayists, and artist, it stands as a contextual source for understanding German photography’s professional history at the end of the century. It requires no claims of scarcity or value; its usefulness, its weight of evidence, and its place in a defined civic and professional context are sufficient reasons for attention.
