Josef H. Darchinger. Wirtschaftswunder

Prosperity is harder to photograph than ruin. Rubble comes with drama built in; a full shop window does not. Josef Heinrich Darchinger spent the 1950s aiming his camera at the least photogenic subject imaginable, a country growing comfortable, and the quiet surprise of this collection is how strange he manages to make comfort look.

The subject is the West German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that turned a bombed, divided nation into a consumer society in barely a decade. Darchinger crossed the young Federal Republic in black and white and, unusually for the moment, in color, cataloguing the evidence of recovery: fresh neon bolted over scarred facades, appliances stacked in bright pyramids, a new Volkswagen parked like a trophy, workers streaming from factory gates into a life that finally ran a surplus.

The color is the reason to sit with the work. Fifties documentary photography lives in memory as gray, and Darchinger's transparencies break that spell, rendering the decade in the actual hues of its shop signs, its enamel, its freshly painted walls. He photographs plainly, almost as a surveyor would. The compositions rarely show off. They accumulate.

Darchinger knew this world from the inside as a press photographer based in Bonn, the modest provisional capital of the new republic, and the images carry a reporter's nose for the telling ordinary detail. He photographed the machinery of the miracle and its human weather in the same even light: the autobahn filling with private cars, the first television sets glowing in front-room windows, Sunday crowds dressed up with nowhere grander to go than a rebuilt café. A corner grocer and a cabinet minister get the same unhurried civic attention. Nobody is caricatured, and nobody is spared.

He did not only shoot the winners. Between the gleaming displays he found the people the miracle had passed over, the day laborers and pensioners and bombed-out families still waiting for their share, and the juxtapositions give the project its spine. Not every frame carries on its own. Taken singly, many are simple records, a street, a storefront, a machine, and the individual picture can feel thinner than the whole.

A colder history presses at the edges of the frame. This was a nation split down the middle, its eastern half a separate state, and the abundance Darchinger recorded was also an argument, proof that the Western model delivered the goods. Prosperity here was never innocent. It was a Cold War exhibit, and the photographs are quietly aware of being evidence in a contest.

The reward is cumulative. Page after page, a quiet unease rises through the abundance, the sense of a society buying its way briskly past a history it has barely begun to reckon with, prosperity worn like a good coat over something colder. Darchinger never editorializes. He just keeps the receipts.

There is a working lesson in that restraint. He trusted the ordinary to turn historical on its own schedule, and it did; the abundance he recorded so flatly now reads as a time capsule, and the flatness is exactly why it reads as truth rather than nostalgia. Photograph your own era's dull prosperity plainly enough, and the years will supply all the drama you were disciplined enough to leave out.

Ruin was the easy subject, the one that announces its own importance. Darchinger took the harder one, the smell of new paint over old wounds, and made it last.