Signed, Jürgen BECKER - Eine Zeit ohne Wörter - 1971

A great opportunity to acquire a signed copy of the long out-of-print photo book 'Zeit ohne Wörter' (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch #20) by the late writer Jürgen Becker, published in 2024!

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Background information about the SIGNED photobook 'Jürgen Becker. Zeit ohne Wörter'.

Jürgen BECKER (1932-2024) was a significant writer, a member of the important 'Gruppe47' for post-war Germany, and also a photographer. In the 1960s, he gained recognition for a highly experimental style of literature that primarily opposed traditional storytelling in favor of open form. In later texts, this impulse was toned down, while landscape continued to play an important role in his poetry. Besides his poems, which constitute his main body of work, he also wrote stories and radio plays. As a photographer, Jürgen BECKER is known to only a few. Only two photo books featuring his images have been published: 'A Time Without Words' and 'New York 1972'. In the first book, his photos reflect not so much the objects themselves but rather the moments when objects evoke a visual experience. The second book, published by his son, the photographer and filmmaker Boris BECKER, contains black-and-white images taken in 1972 on the streets of the US metropolis.

Content of the photo book 'Time without words'

The photographic diary 'A Time Without Words,' published in 1971 by Jürgen BECKER (1932-2024), contains a collection of unremarkable photographs, such as seemingly accidental snapshots from contemporary Germany, only sparsely commented on. It marks a shift from the experimental prose of his first three books, 'Felder' (1964), 'Ränder' (1968), and 'Umgebungen' (1970), to the medium of photography. In the long-out-of-print photo book 'A Time Without Words,' he documented 'less the objects themselves, but rather moments of halted and moving time, of movement and the frozen instant.' (see blurb below)

The photo book 'Zeit ohne Wörter' by Jürgen BECKER is a visual novel composed of many serial images, often presented four to a double page. Usually, only a few moments lie between the individual images, such as the chapter made up of 30 shots titled 'Thirty Minutes in the Old Environment.' The photos were presumably taken around Cologne, with many more captured in Berlin. The novel is extremely conceptual and at the same time very romantic.
In 'Zeit ohne Wörter,' Jürgen Becker explores the medium of photography. The idea of serial production was to create a sequence of images connected as a series to deepen a theme or idea. This could be achieved by repeating a motif, systematically capturing changes, or through other forms of systematic creation. Even today, 54 years after its publication, the avant-garde character of the book still resonates.

Book jacket blurb

Jürgen Becker has changed his medium, but he no longer considers himself a photographer; instead, he continues to see himself as a writer who, this time, works with images rather than words. The switch is not surprising: for a reader who has noticed in Becker's texts the effect of visual stimuli and impulses on language, his optical dependence on things, processes, and landscapes. In this book, he reacts directly by going beyond the linguistic mediation process and capturing certain objects photographically. His photos are less about the objects themselves and more about the moments when objects evoke a visual experience: moments of halted and ongoing time; moments of approaching and receding, of movement and the frozen instant. Moreover, Becker understands his photos as documents of a consciousness process that conveys associations and memories, directly linked to the titles that give each photo series a kind of narrative content. When these titles sometimes read more like sentences from unwritten stories or labels for unrecorded processes, they direct the viewer's imagination beyond the photographic object into a realm where mere visual communication can be complemented by possible associations. Thus, each photo or photo series has a background, an environment, experienced as subjectively as the author perceives it, yet open to the viewer's associative interpretation. Jürgen Becker took his photos over the course of a year, during a 'time without words,' which establishes the external context of the book: following the traces of his last book 'Environments,' he leaves this realm and re-discovers it as changed after a longer stay in Berlin, where the time without words has also transitioned into a period of new literary projects.




Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, 1971. First and only edition, extremely few of which were SIGNED by the author.

Paperback edition without dust jacket (as published). 180 x 110 mm. 223 pages with approximately 280 duotone images. Text in German.

Condition: The book is in very good condition for its age - 54 years (!) - both inside and out, with very slight scuffs on the top and bottom edges of the back cover, as well as light discolorations on the page edges and spine. It was signed by Jürgen Becker on November 25, 2012!