Ulrich Wüst - Yearbook – Signs and Travels

In this book, Berlin photographer Ulrich Wüst (born 1949) has brought together images from the past 30 years. He took them in different places, in Berlin, in German cities and on trips, mostly in Europe. Ulrich Wüst is not a travel photographer, none of the photographs were commissioned, reportage is not his speciality. Rather, these images are the visual diary of a photographer who, since his beginnings, has been dealing with spaces that people have created for their self-expression and expression of life. And it does not follow a strict chronology, although it was created continuously over the years.

Ulrich Wüst, whose analytical, strict city photographs have become widely known, shows a different, almost lyrical and associative side of his work in this diary. Subtle compositions of seemingly insignificant details, supposedly random observations on the outskirts and in the grey areas of cities and in the open country are the material with which the photographer develops an often melancholic poetics of the visual arts. Even if some of the images seem as if they were taken from the inventory of dreams, they show a fragile reality beyond certainties and often with clear signs of decay.

Just as a written diary has no other criteria than the subjective truth of the author at the moment of writing, these pictures are also an intimate way for the photographer to communicate with himself, his medium and the shape of the surrounding space. Ulrich Wüst photographs exclusively in black and white, avoids sharp contrasts, captures the atmospheric in richly differentiated gray tones and the situational in a considered serenity of vision. He studied architecture and worked as a town planner before turning entirely to photography, so he is familiar with the symbolic and practical meaning of urban and rural situations and their individual details.

The visual narratives of these places are on the one hand historical, but more importantly they are very current. The signs of culture, economy and, not least, politics that Ulrich Wüst sees and depicts in them form an aesthetically impressive and at the same time disturbing subtext to the current state of the world.