Ulrich Wust

Originally a city planner, German photographer Ulrich Wüst (born 1949) has photographed the derelict buildings and bleak landscapes of East Germany from the GDR era to the present day. While hyperlocal, his black-and-white images speak to universal phenomena of social change and its material manifestations.

Ulrich Wüst (born 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 200 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.