Just Life gathers black-and-white photographs made by the engineer Peter Dammann between the 1960s and the 1990s, drawn from a personal archive he maintained for decades without any thought of publication. Family celebrations, excursions, birthdays and funerals recur across thousands of frames, yet Dammann’s aim was rarely mere record-keeping; he followed the example of photographers he admired and trained his eye against theirs. He printed his own work in bathrooms, storage rooms and at last a basement darkroom, filed negatives and contact sheets in labelled binders and boxes, and enlarged the images he judged best to 18 × 24 centimetres for storage in wooden crates of his own making.
The book belongs to Hartmann Books’ lost&found series, which brings analogue photographs and neglected picture archives back into view. Its editorial premise is that such material carries several stories at once: of the photographer, of the subject, of the archive and its discovery, and of the physical decay that use and storage leave on film. Accordingly the images appear unretouched, their scratches, tonal shifts and emulsion wear left intact rather than corrected.
Just Life is the first public presentation of this private chronicle, encouraged by Dammann’s son, the artist Martin Dammann, and accompanied by an exhibition at the Opelvillen in Rüsselsheim in 2018, staged as a partner project to the RAY international photography triennial. The booklet runs to 48 pages with 57 illustrations, measures 14.8 × 21 cm, and is issued with German and English texts; it was edited by Peter Dammann, Beate Kemfert and Markus Hartmann, with graphic design by Antonia Grösschen. Dammann continued developing black-and-white film until 2007, when the last roll he processed was numbered 422.
For collectors, the interest lies in what this object demonstrates rather than in any claim about its scarcity: an amateur’s sustained, self-taught practice, an archive kept in working order across decades, and a sequence that treats ordinary family life as photographic material worth attending to. Its booklet-in-cellophane-bag format places it deliberately outside the conventions of the standard monograph.
Chinese translation below.
