In 1982, Erasmus Schröter printed and bound a hundred copies of Nachts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. The photographs inside were made a year or two earlier, during nights out in the GDR — at balls and the opera, in fairs and artists’ festivals — and they were shot on infrared film with what was known as the black flash method. How Schröter obtained that film in East Germany has never been explained. What he did with it is legible in every frame: faces and gestures dissolving into a blurred, heightened register that sits somewhere between document and dream.
Lange Nacht is not a reprint of that student book. Not all of the original negatives survive, so newly found archival material has been folded into the sequence, and the result carries a new title rather than the status of a facsimile. Seventy-three illustrations, an expanded gathering of the nocturnal excursions Schröter made mostly in Leipzig: people waiting, couples, dancers, tattooed men at fairs, circus performers. Uwe Kolbe, a poet and a friend of the photographer in the 1970s and 80s who sometimes joined those evenings, contributes a text that keeps close to the texture of the period, alongside writings by Schröter himself and by Annette Schröter, whose account of the project’s beginnings opens the book.
Born in 1956, Schröter left the GDR in 1985 in protest and returned to Leipzig only in the 1990s; he died in 2021. His wider habits as an artist — collecting East German children’s toys and architectural postcards, and putting them back into his work — suggest why these pictures resist nostalgia. The everyday material of a vanished state becomes, in his hands, something formally charged. Jakob Kirch of Lamm & Kirch designed the volume, which Hartmann Books issues in a linen binding with silk-screen printing, German and English texts, at 30 by 24 centimeters.
For a collector, the argument rests less on scarcity than on sequence and reconstruction: how a young photographer’s technical gamble became a body of work, and how a later generation of editors has tried to honor the pace of the original book while admitting what was lost. The photographs also appear in “Two Germanies circa 1980” at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, from April to October 2026, which places them in the company they deserve.
