Valentin Goppel’s Zwischen den Jahren opens with an unfinished note left on a kitchen table: “Unis are closed, might stay a few more days.” The sentence breaks off mid-word, and the book that follows takes its cue from that interruption. Published by GOST Books in 2024, this eighty-page hardback gathers photographs Goppel made of friends and acquaintances around New Year’s Eve 2020, when the pandemic had suspended ordinary time and left his generation in a condition the title names precisely.

The German phrase describes the quiet interval between Christmas and New Year, days that belong to no particular year. Goppel uses it as a figure for the passage from youth to adulthood, and for the broader paralysis of a period when the future had become unreadable. His subjects were his peers, and the pictures depend on that proximity: they are made from inside a shared situation rather than observed from a professional distance. The photographing became a way of managing uncertainty, both for the photographer and for those in front of the camera.

That closeness gives the sequence its tenor. These are not reportorial documents of lockdown so much as portraits of a generation waiting, often indoors, often together, caught between one stage of life and the next. The book moves through this suspended territory with an attentiveness to ordinary rooms, casual postures, and the strange weight of days that do not count. The cumulative effect is quiet and cumulative, and it earns its melancholy without insisting on it.

For readers, the book’s interest lies in how deliberately it binds form to subject. The title is not decorative; it structures the edit, and the photographs answer to it. Goppel belongs to a cohort of younger European photographers whose work has turned the recent past into something more reflective than documentary, and this is an early, considered statement of that position. The design and sequencing carry the argument as much as any single image.