Gary Van Zante: The Presence of Something Past

Ulrich Wüst (*1949) trained as an urban planner and began photographing East German cities in the late 1970s. Today, his early work is widely recognized as a subtly formulated critique of social conditions in the GDR and one of the most important photographic records of the socialist state. Since the 1990s, he has expanded his practice to focus on the memory landscape of reunified Germany and the transformations of both city and countryside, particularly the villages and farming culture of Uckermark and other rural regions. In this first monograph on Wüst, Van Zante provides a context for his work in American and German urban photography and photography of place. Over two hundred photographs are published here, many for the first time, including a selection of Wüst's distinctive leporellos of titled series. An interview with the photographer and an exhibition and publishing history are included. Gary Van Zante is curator of the photography, design and architecture collections at the MIT Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Zusammenfassung
2023 Book award recipient from the Photography Network of the College Art Association"This book is the first monographic survey of East-German-born photographer Ulrich Wüst. Jurors found this lushly illustrated book to be not only a well-written and organized retrospective of Wüst's photographic oeuvre, exploring connections between Wust's work and a range of contemporaries and predecessors from Bernd and Hilla Becher to Walker Evans and Lewis Baltz, but also a valuable introduction to photography in East Germany and the urban landscape in the German Democratic Republic. Van Zante's substantive essay opens up the story of photography as art in East Germany and weaves the development of Wüst's practice through key historical moments."https://www.photographynetwork.net/news/2022-photography-network-awardees-hpnzf