„…irgendwer hat immer fotografiert…“
Private Fotografie in Ostdeutschland 1980–2000
Friedrich Tietjen/Marie Egger/Marit Lena Herrmann/Judith Riemer

If you look through private photo albums from East Germany from 1980 to 2000, the pictures hardly change during this period - at most the fashions, hairstyles and cars. And anyone who went on vacation to the Baltic Sea in the 1980s might have gone to Mallorca in the 1990s. The fact that first a state collapsed and then an entire society changed remains almost invisible in the images of school enrolments, weekend trips and Christmas presents. "... someone always had a camera ..." evaluates a project that has been examining the private visual worlds of these two decades in albums and on the basis of interviews with contemporary witnesses since 2020. The essays in this volume understand private photography as a social practice and discuss how images were produced, organized and viewed in albums and how political conditions were inscribed in them.

Marie Egger is an art historian researching Mail Art in the GDR during the 1970s and 1980s. Marit Herrmann works as a curator and is compiling the catalog raisonné of works by Ute and Werner Mahler. Judith Riemer is a photo historian researching albums by female artists of the 1920s and 1930s. Friedrich Tietjen lives in Leipzig and Frankfurt. He works as an author, university lecturer and curator at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.