Ulrich Wüst is a cool observer of his times who provokes social and political contrasts. Small, everyday absurdities stand in flat contradiction of the collective emphasis of public life as an important part of socialist ideology. In pictorial series developed over lengthy periods, the photographer compiles the absence of a bourgeois society in the GDR and thus explores the collective feeling of privacy – through to substantial emptiness and meaninglessness.Once evaluated only according to its own benchmarks, today the artistic output of the GDR – the photography scene above all – falls under larger contexts, including international ones. Therefore, the comprehensive oeuvre of Ulrich Wüst is also to be read in context with renowned American photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Ed Ruscha, or Stephen Shore. Ulrich Wüst (b. 1949) was in the 1970s a city planner and a picture editor in East Berlin; he has worked as a freelance photographer since 1984. Among other venues, Wüst has exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Berlinische Galerie, the Neues Museum Weimar, the Leonhardi-Museum, Dresden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art