Gary Van Zante: The Presence of Something PastUlrich Wst (born 1949) trained as an urban planner and began photographing East German cities in the late 1970s. Today, his early work is widely recognized as a subtly formulated critique of social conditions in the GDR and one of the most important photographic records of the socialist state. Since the 1990s, he has expanded his practice to focus on the memory landscape of reunified Germany and the transformations of both city and countryside,