Between 1979 and 1985, Ulrich Wüst photographed East German cities with the patience of an observer who knew them from within. Trained in architecture and civil engineering in Weimar, he worked as a city planner until 1977 and afterward as a picture editor; from 1983 he was a freelance photographer, and by the middle of the 1980s he was considered one of the most important photographers in the GDR. His black-and-white pictures hold an exacting balance between apparent objectivity and quiet irony, registering not only how cities changed but the absence of any collective vision directing that change. The “Stadtbilder” series is regarded as the central body of his East German years, and this book presents it comprehensively, combining the complete fifty-image portfolio with roughly fifty further photographs Wüst printed only recently from original negatives.
Sequence matters here as much as any individual frame. Wüst’s streets, squares, and new building sites are photographed with a planner’s attention to structure and a picture editor’s sense of adjacency, so that blank facades, provisional repairs, and unglamorous horizons accumulate into an argument rather than a survey. The book’s editorial apparatus is deliberately spare: an essay by Matthias Flügge and an interview with the photographer by Katia Reich supply context without crowding the plates, and the design by Lamm&Kirch, with its french-fold dust jacket, treats the photographs as material to be handled rather than illustrations to be captioned.
Hartmann Books issued Cityscapes 1979–1985 in 2021 as a bilingual German/English edition of 160 pages. Its 102 illustrations extend the subject beyond the borders of the GDR: Wüst’s cities belong to the wider conversation about what documentary photography can do with ordinary urban terrain, a discussion in which his work has been regularly cited since his participation in documenta 14 in 2017. The German Photobook Award 2023, Bronze Medal, recognized the volume as a considered object in its own right, not merely a record of pictures already known.
For a collector, the case is structural. This is the first gathering of the full “Stadtbilder” portfolio together with recently printed companion negatives, and for serious holdings of postwar German documentary photography its claim is completeness rather than novelty. The bilingual texts, the interview, and the restrained design make it a usable primary document, one that rewards repeated viewing rather than a single first impression.
