66 Books from East Germany

Foxed Editions presents 66 Photobooks from East Germany by Thomas Wiegand, the first English-language introduction to photographic book culture in the GDR. For much of the twentieth century, Germany was divided into two states, and while West German photography has long been integrated into international histories of the medium, photographic culture in the GDR has remained comparatively overlooked.

Drawing on Wiegand’s German-language study of over 500 pages and approximately 1,300 illustrations, this book presents a carefully selected survey of 66 photobooks produced in the GDR between 1950 and 1990, making that research accessible to an international audience. Photography in the GDR was never neutral: state-supported, ideologically directed, and yet often graphically inventive and visually striking, even under strict conditions of censorship and material scarcity.

"Many GDR photobooks achieve a high level of narrative and visual coherence not in spite of, but because of, their humanistic and socialist orientation."

Thomas Weigand

All publications passed through systems of approval governed by censorship, central planning, and material scarcity. Within these constraints, designers, photographers, and printers produced works of real graphic sophistication, supported by Leipzig’s long-standing printing and publishing traditions. Photobooks celebrated industrial achievement, collective labour, and everyday life under socialism. Volumes such as Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR presented the capital as a model socialist city.

Despite their quality, East German photobooks remained largely absent from international discourse for decades. Several titles have since been recognised in international canons of the most important photobooks, among them Stalinallee (1955), Kriegsfibel (1955), and China (1957). Wiegand’s research is the first sustained effort to map this terrain in depth.

Published by Foxed Editions as part of an ongoing programme dedicated to overlooked and underrepresented histories of photography, 66 Photobooks from East Germany is a guide to a visual culture shaped by ideology, constraint, and creativity, and one that expands the established geography of the photobook.

Thomas Wiegand (born 1960 in Eschwege) is a photographer and art historian specialising in the history of the photobook. He is the author of Deutschland im Fotobuch (Steidl, 2011), a comprehensive survey of German photobooks, and Freude Frohsinn Kannibalen: Photobooks from the GDR (Jenior, Kassel, 2025), the landmark German-language study on which this book is based. He has contributed to major international publications including Czech and Slovak Photo Publications 1918–1989 and Factory Photobooks (RRB Photobooks, 2021) and is widely regarded as the leading authority on East German photographic publishing.