Kim Mayer’s Wodka&Schokolade / Водка и шоколад brings a family history of displacement into a bilingual book. The book grew out of a June 2024 journey Mayer made with her father to Kazakhstan, where both of her parents were born and where her grandfather had been deported. Her research journeys covered more than 18,000 kilometres across Kazakhstan and Germany; the photographs that resulted are documentary images, arranged still lifes, portraits, and material drawn from a family archive.
Mayer is the photographer here, and the book is her master’s thesis project for HFK Bremen. She works with interviews she conducted with other Russian Germans and with a chapter addressing their wider history, so that the private record of one family is set beside the larger story of deportation and resettlement. The recurring questions are those of belonging, home, and inherited identity — asked rather than answered. German and Russian run through the text, and photographs, writing, and comments are placed in relation to one another.
That relation is also a matter of form. Of the 212 pages, some have been shortened, producing a collage-like structure that lets the book register a fractured sense of identity rather than smooth it away. Cyan recurs in the design and ink, a deliberate echo of the Kazakhstan flag. At the back, every copy carries a different piece of a single graphic; gathered together, the pieces would make a whole. The binding is exposed thread, so the construction remains visible. Self-published and dated 2024, the book was recorded alongside an exhibition held in Bremen on 8 and 9 October 2024, and it won the 2025/26 German Photobook Prize in the graduation-project category.
For a collector, the draw lies less in any claim of rarity than in the way concept, sequence, and physical making reinforce one another. A book whose design uses shortened pages, whose language is split, and whose final graphic is dispersed among readers holds together an argument about displacement that its photographs and interviews alone could not make. It deserves attention as a considered piece of bookmaking and as a material response to an inherited history.
