Michael Dressel was born in East Berlin in 1958 and has lived for decades in Los Angeles, a double vantage that sharpens his eye for the United States in the run-up to a presidential election. His second photobook, “The End Is Near, Here,” gathers portraits and landscapes made across the American West, where the photographer finds a hardness he has described as cosmic in scale and indifferent to human presence. The book’s title announces its temper: this is not reportage that flatters its subject, but a sustained look at a society the photographer sees as frayed by nationalism, polarization, religious fervor, gun culture, and poverty.
The formal decision to pair faces with terrain is central. Dressel’s portraits carry the weight of encounter, while the landscapes—empty lots, exhausted ground, places marked by what people have left behind—extend the argument beyond individual psychology. Together they propose that the country’s mood is legible both in its citizens and in the ground they occupy. F. Scott Hess contributes an essay, and the book is designed by Jan Spading; the collaboration gives the sequence a considered, deliberative pace rather than the shock rhythm of spot news.
Hartmann Books issues the volume as a softcover with a multi-wrapped cover, 176 pages and 104 illustrations, with text in English and German, at 20 × 25 cm. The bilingual apparatus and the Berlin–Los Angeles axis are not incidental: Dressel’s biography—including two years in East German prisons after a failed escape attempt and a later career as a Hollywood sound editor—informs the Central European perspective he brings to American decline. The publisher’s own framing places the book on the eve of a historic vote, and its end-time title is meant to be read as diagnosis rather than prophecy.
For collectors, the interest lies in the conjunction of subject, timing, and authorship: a photographer with an unusual biography turning his attention to the American political landscape at a charged moment, in a carefully designed edition that treats image and text as equal partners.
