Death is the one subject everyone shares and almost no one discusses in public. That silence is the point of departure for *Wer bist du, Tod?*, a 2025 collaboration between the author Sonja Hartwig and the photographer Nora Klein, published by Hartmann Books. Eight people who knew their lives would be short agreed to be accompanied closely through their final days. From that proximity come texts and pictures that ask rather than conclude. The book takes seriously the presumption of trying to portray or explain death, and it proceeds anyway, because the alternative — speechlessness — costs more.
Klein’s photographs and Hartwig’s writing are interleaved rather than merely bound together, which is where the book distinguishes itself from the illustrated essay and the documentary monograph alike. The photography is not asked to carry the whole argument. It works alongside the text, and the result is a volume about ending that keeps returning to how a life was actually lived. The publisher describes the responses gathered here as unsparing, painful, tender, and profound; the range is not a blurring of positions but the substance of the project.
Hartmann Books has produced the German-language edition at 18.5 by 24 centimeters, 264 pages, with 106 illustrations, in hardcover with a color cut and a reading band, designed by Hannah Feldmeier in Leipzig. The smaller-than-usual trim keeps the book intimate rather than monumental, a proportion that suits its subject. The reading band suggests that the publishers expect the volume to be handled and returned to, not displayed at a distance.
For a collector of photobooks that treat mortality without sentimentality, this book earns its place through its method: sustained access, shared authorship between a writer and a photographer, and a refusal to universalize the experiences of the eight people at its center. It is a considered argument against the public invisibility of ordinary death, made in the form of a book that can be read and reread.
