In 1986, Michael Kerstgens was a student at the Gesamthochschule Essen, formerly the Folkwangschule, when he received a scholarship with an unusual brief: to take a photographic look at the subject of leisure. The assignment could have produced something slight. Instead, Kerstgens turned his lens on West Germans at play — on tennis courts and golf courses, at the swimming pool, in the stands at football matches, in the gym, in the shops, in the front seats of Golfs and Opels. The resulting pictures are collected in *1986 – Back to the Present*, published by Hartmann Books in 2021 as a hardcover of 176 pages with 97 illustrations, texts in English and German, and contributions by Klaus Honnef, Ralf Beil and Michael Kerstgens.
The year matters. Chernobyl melted down that April; the Cold War was winding toward its end; Helmut Kohl governed in Bonn; AIDS was only beginning to be recognised in Germany as a pandemic threat. Yet the Federal Republic was entering a phase in which consumption itself became a form of leisure — a relatively carefree prosperity that, in retrospect, could not have known what the end of the decade would bring. Much recent photographic attention has gone to the German Democratic Republic. Kerstgens looks at the other side, and his laconic, precisely observed documentary method keeps sentiment at arm’s length. The photographs do not argue; they notice.
Honnef’s essay characterises the 1980s as West Germany’s favourite decade, and the book’s title works in two directions: a specific historical moment and a deliberate return to it. The design, by Kerstgens with Jutta Herden, treats the material as an archive under examination rather than a nostalgia object, and the presentation gives the sequence room to build. The images were also shown at the Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte in 2021, an exhibition context that underscored the work’s documentary seriousness.
For readers drawn to the social landscape of postwar Europe, the book earns its place alongside other records of ordinary life under late-twentieth-century affluence. Its significance lies less in spectacle than in the patience of its looking: a young photographer given a modest assignment, and a body of work that now reads as a considered portrait of a society on the verge of change.
