FRG, photographed by Georg Kussmann and published by MACK in 2023, was made across the Federal Republic of Germany during a single summer. Kussmann approached the country on foot, sleeping outdoors and continuing through streets and landscapes where curiosity was accompanied by fear. The resulting photographs attend to ordinary life—work, leisure, public space and the surfaces of daily routine—while registering a more unsettled condition beneath it.

The book takes its point of departure from Heiner Müller’s image of German history as being covered by a blanket that preserves warmth while allowing stagnation and cold to persist at the edges. Kussmann does not illustrate that metaphor directly. Instead, he finds its tension in scenes that can appear unremarkable until a gesture, a physical act or a graffitied slogan breaks their composure. More often, unease remains muted, held in the atmosphere of places and in the disciplined repetition of social life.

FRG is distinguished by the persistence of its sequence. Across 224 pages, the photographs accumulate rather than resolve, describing a country caught between the burden of its past and the pressures of the present. References to work ethics, systems of command and the language of acronyms give the project a specifically German historical charge, but Kussmann’s approach remains observational and restrained. The book’s significance lies in this refusal of easy diagnosis: contemporary Germany emerges as a place struggling to recognise itself through the details of everyday experience.

For collectors, FRG merits attention as a sustained photographic study whose force depends on duration, proximity and the relation between individual images. Issued by MACK as a paperback in 2023, it presents Kussmann’s determined encounter with his home country as an extensive, carefully held body of work rather than a selection of isolated statements. The publisher describes the book as a limited edition of 1,000 signed copies.