The work of German photographer Martin Waldbauer, with its gritty directness, has been compared to the confrontational street photography of Bruce Gilden. But rather than taking pictures on the streets of New York, Waldbauer photographs mostly in the Bavarian mountains and his subjects are farm workers, laborers, and vagabonds — people he’s met on the streets of sparsely populated villages, on their farms, and in their shops. These images of hard-working rural people and of the surrounding landscapes feel like they have fallen out from some other time.

In his latest self-titled monograph, Waldbauer invokes the ghosts of photography’s past to construct a complex German identity using his stark portraits and contrastingly quiet still lifes and landscapes of the Bavarian forests and mountains. In this episode of The Photobook Show, we’ll look at his work and how he calls upon the legacies of photographers like Josef Sudek and Andre Kertesz and brings them into our time.