Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a different kind of travelogue. With it, the reader travels through time while remaining in the same place - the village of Berka in Thuringia. The village was photographed by three generations of photographers in one family over a period of seventy years, from 1950 to 2022. It is an unusual project, the result of several coincidences, which says much about this country, the village, its people, and how things have developed. In 2022-23 the long-term project, photographed entirely in analog and black and white, was completed, and the idea for the book, which has been maturing for several years, begins to take shape. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck, the journalist (and friend of the artist) Anja Maier, the sociologist Steffen Mau (Humboldt University Berlin) and the American photo historian Gary Van Zante (MIT, Boston) describe the place, the time, the people, the photographers, and the photographs. Graphic designer Florian Lamm uses subtle design ideas to develop a complex layout that shapes images and texts into a dense, grand narrative reminiscent of great literary, photographic, and cinematic role models
