Hatje Cantz/Berlinische Galerie

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) didn't sell his first photograph until he was 46. Trained as a sculptor, he never lost his eye for mass and form. His photographs of Berlin daily life during the 1920s, '30s and '40s freeze passersby in poses either accidentally graceful or, more frequently, droll and ungainly. In 'Shine' (1925), four women clamber out of a swimming pool; the title refers to the wet gleam of the fabric on their behinds. Elsewhere in 'Friedrich Seidenstücker: Of Hippos and Other Humans, Photographs 1925-1958' (Hatje Cantz, 327 pages, $60), a man hinges awkwardly at the waist, leaning over a railing to get a better look into a cage at the zoo. Seidenstücker relished confounding man and beast, as in the image of a curious rhino peering at a seemingly captive zookeeper (above). On a trip to Copenhagen, he snapped a man whose splay-footed waddle evokes nothing so much as a penguin—indeed, he is dragging a box of fish down the sidewalk. But the irony on display in the book's more than 200 images can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis' rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself. 'This entire period did not agree with me' was Seidenstücker's understated explanation—though during the war he sustained a Jewish friend with gifts of food. Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.

—The Editors