Photo Album Recording the Setting up of an East German Grocery and Home Appliance Store

Leatherette. Ribbon tie. Very Good. N.d., circa 1969. Oblong, 22 by 30 cm. With 110 photographs, mounted one to four per leaf, depicting the setting up of an East German supermarket and home appliances store, from the build-out of raw space to the stocking of the shelves and final touches of display spaces. Included also are photos of presumably the managerial staff conferencing and then shoppers in the newly opened store(s). The photos make no claim to artistic merit; they were almost certainly done matter-of-factly to record the process and then to be buried in a file cabinet kept by the Nomenklatura. In our view, the crudity of the photos is actually part of their virtue to us, as we can trust that they capture things as they more or less really were. And it seems to us that the photos are a true time capsule that brings us back to the dreariness behind the Iron Curtain when the economies were no longer suffering from wartime devastation but their valiant efforts to match the prosperity of the West were heroically pathetic. And thus we see shelves that while not necessarily empty were drab and uninviting to anyone accustomed to Western abundance. The same pronouncement might also be applied to the people caught in the photographs -- women in beehives, men in standard issue suits, but all looking distinctly out of step with the Swinging Sixties. Light wear.