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

In his latest self-titled monograph, Waldbauer invokes the ghosts of photograph’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, 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.