Marion Kalter began as a journalist, carrying a camera into rooms where the avant-garde of the 1970s was still arguing, drinking and posing. Her portraits of Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and Meret Oppenheim belong to that documentary impulse, and Deep Time gathers them alongside photographers she met in Paris and at early editions of the Rencontres d’Arles, among them Mary Ellen Mark and Garry Winogrand. The book, her first monograph, was published by Hartmann Books in 2022 and accompanied an exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg; it is edited with a restraint that lets the decades collide rather than smoothing them into a retrospective.

What distinguishes the volume is its method. Kalter does not arrange her photographs chronologically, nor does she separate commissioned portraits from private experiments. Radical staged self-portraits sit beside still lifes of objects from her parents’ estate; collages of historical photographs meet recent pictures taken with a smartphone. The result is a pictorial cosmos in which geographical and temporal levels overlap, and the only stable element is the intensity Kalter brings to the attempt to understand her own past. The sequence is deliberate, and the design by Claas Möller gives the images room to speak without explanatory weight.

Three writers—Kerstin Stremmel, Florian Ebner and Jean-Jacques Lebel—contribute texts, with an introduction by Thorsten Sadowsky.

Across 184 pages and 135 illustrations, the book moves between techniques and registers without losing its focus on people, which has been Kalter’s subject since her earliest assignments. The volume is bilingual in German and English. Published in softcover at 21 × 26 cm, Deep Time is an exhibition catalogue that reads as an artist’s book, and its juxtapositions—portrait, self-staging, still life, collage, phone snapshot—make it a considered addition to holdings in postwar portraiture and the photographic memory of the 1970s avant-garde.