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'The smell of domestic and industrial coal, the creaking steps in the central stairwell, the toilets in the corridors. The joy of relatives seeing each other again and the unwrapping of presents; the coffee smelt so good that all else could wait.' - Ute Eskildsen and Timm Rautert While visiting family in Leipzig in fall 1972, two young photographers by the names of Ute Eskildsen and Timm Rautert decided to photograph the city together, with the idea of publishing the series as a book. The photos were made yet then forgotten: the book—Leipzig 1972—is now being published more than half a century later. Eskildsen and Rautert had met at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen and at the time neither could have anticipated the prominent roles they would come to play in photography in Germany: Eskildsen as founding director of the acclaimed photography collection at Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Rautert as professor of photography at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. The images in this book record their first time in Leipzig together; Rautert had relatives there, visited often and grown to love the city, while the trip marked Eskildsen’s very first visit to the German Democratic Republic. During a week of photography, they captured an intensely subjective, quiet picture of the city, one which now forms a remarkable historical record of a city then in a divided country and still bearing the scars of war.

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9783969992739

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Ute Eskildsen, born in Itzehoe in 1947, did her apprenticeship in fashion and portrait studios and studied photography and photo history at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung, Essen. She then worked as a freelance photographer and at the university, GH Essen, was Otto Steinert's assistant and held several internships and work stays in the USA. From 1978 onwards, Eskildsen built up the photographic department at the Museum Folkwang and headed it until 2012. From 1991 she was also deputy museum director of the Folkwang. From 2012 to 2015, she was a visiting professor at the University of Wales, Newport. From 2016 to 2022, she acted as an advisor and founding curator of the Kunsthaus Göttingen. Since 2012, Ute Eskildsen has been working as a freelance curator and lives in Essen. Born in 1941 in Tuchel, West Prussia, Timm Rautert studied photography with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen in the 1960s. Starting in the 1970s, he mainly concentrated on photojournalism and documentary work, and in 1993 was appointed professor of photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where he taught until 2008. In the same year, he was the first photographer to receive the Lovis Corinth Prize. His books with Steidl include When We Don’t See You, You Don’t See Us Either (2007), No Photographing (2011), Josef Sudek, Prague 1967 (2016), Vintage (2017), Germans in Uniform (2018), Anfang/Beginnings (2019) and Bildanalytische Photographie / Image-Analytical Photography, 1968–1974 (2020).

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