Gray city, magical country. This is how you break down the big arguments that make so many people (and more and more) point the finger at the seething juggernaut and go to the backwater where the cock crows and the cow moos. But the idyll is deceptive. Hay bales become hay fever, the dolce far niente becomes getting up at 4 a.m., and anyone who has ever gone for a walk while the farmer next door fertilizes his field with excrement knows that pretty meadows lose their charm over it. Hermann Hirsch and Jan Leßmann have moved to the countryside, bye bye Big City Life, hello Small Idyllic World. What it’s like out there and that life also finds you in Mother Nature’s belly button is documented by the two with their work “Stadt. Country. Dorf”, an unembellished documentation of the ugly, bizarre and yet wonderful aspects of rural life. Hermann Hirsch, Jan Leßmann & Eva Reisinger, “Stadt. Country. village”, Knesebeck, hardcover, 192 pages, with 180 color and black and white photographs, approx. 32.-
