If you look through private photo albums from East Germany dating from the period 1980 to 2000, you will notice very little changing in the pictures — at most the fashions, the hairstyles, and the cars. Meanwhile, the people who holidayed on the Baltic in the eighties quite possibly headed for Mallorca in the nineties. The fact that during this time a state went into terminal decline and then an entire society was turned upside down goes all but unseen in the pictures of children on their first day at school, weekend jaunts, and people exchanging Christmas presents. “… someone always had a camera …” takes stock of a project that, since 2020, has been looking at private albums from these two decades to examine the world of private images they contain, informed by interviews with contemporary witnesses. In the essays in this volume, private photography is treated as a social practice, and the authors discuss how images were produced, organized in albums, and viewed, and how political conditions were registered 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 preparing the catalogue raisonné on Ute and Werner Mahler. Judith Riemer is a photo historian who conducts research on albums by 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.