Volker Hinz (1947–2019) spent decades photographing the politicians who shaped West Germany and the wider Cold War world. EinBlick, the third and final volume in a trilogy devoted to his early career, takes its title from a double meaning: a single glance, and an insight. Both are apt. Hinz worked as a stern photographer from the early 1970s onward, accompanying Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl on campaigns, foreign trips, and at conferences, and also photographing Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. He had the good fortune to work in an era when an unwritten trust still existed between politicians and the press, which allowed him to make pictures that read as astonishingly private today.
The book pairs those portraits with selected reports from four eventful decades. Hinz photographed meetings of the Ku Klux Klan, street battles in the Irish conflict, miners in the Ruhr, and East German civil rights activists after the fall of the Wall. Across these assignments, his empathy toward the people he observed is the constant: faces that register how political decisions alter individual lives. The trilogy began with Hello Again (2021) and continued with Carrousel (2023); EinBlick completes a sustained look at politics, social upheaval in the Federal Republic, and the political figures of the late twentieth century.
Edited by Henriette Väth-Hinz, who also contributes an introduction and texts alongside Christiane Grefe, the volume runs to roughly 264 pages with about 268 illustrations. It is designed by Claas Möller in Hamburg and issued in German as a linen hardcover with foil stamping and a tipped-in image, measuring 24 by 26.5 centimeters. Publication coincided with an exhibition at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which took over Hinz’s photographic legacy in 2023—an institutional context that gives the book a documentary anchor beyond the individual pictures.
For collectors of postwar photojournalism, the appeal lies in the access Hinz secured and the sequence in which it is presented here. This is not a single-assignment book but a culminating volume, and it gathers a career’s worth of proximity to power—public and behind the scenes—into one carefully produced object.
