For more than seventy years, three photographers from a single family returned to the same small village in Thuringia and photographed it. Ein Dorf 1950–2022 gathers that accumulation: Ludwig Schirmer, a master miller who photographed Berka alongside his working life and later became one of the GDR’s best-known advertising photographers; his daughter Ute Mahler; and her husband Werner Mahler, both trained at the HGB Leipzig, who made Berka the subject of his diploma and, in 1998, of a return visit. Ute Mahler’s portraits of village young people, made in recent years, complete the arc, some of them descended from those Ludwig Schirmer portrayed in the 1950s. The pictures are analog and black and white throughout.

What distinguishes the book is its structure. The publisher frames it as a travelogue in which the reader moves through time while the location stays fixed, and the sequence makes that literal: the same houses, fields and faces recur across decades, so that change registers as a slow displacement rather than a series of events. Four writers extend the frame — Jenny Erpenbeck, Anja Maier, Steffen Mau and Gary Van Zante — addressing the place, its period, its inhabitants and the photographs themselves. The layout, designed by Lamm&Kirch, builds a dense interplay of image and text.

Hartmann Books published the book in 2024 at 22 × 29.2 cm: 362 pages, 252 illustrations, German and English texts, clothbound with foil-stamped lettering across the front, spine and back. It received the German Photobook Award 2024, Gold Medal: a German village photographed across the postwar decades, through the GDR and after.

The lineage is not a conceit but the substance of the project: three photographers, one place, and a web of related subjects. This is the book in which the archive and the recent work meet, and its design treats that meeting as the central event.