Sebastian Linck was born in 1980 in Darmstadt, Germany, and spent a year travelling through Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Berlin between 2008 and 2009. When he came home, he did not want his photographs to sit on a hard drive. He wanted them in print — in his own bookshelf, specifically. So in 2009 he ordered 500 copies of his first self-published photo magazine, A5-format, offset-printed, no ads, no text beyond the bare minimum. He called it uebergrund.
The name translates roughly as "above ground" — a play on the concept of going over ground, walking through urban landscapes, letting the city speak through its surfaces. But it also nods to the underground, the subterranean world of tunnels, catacombs, and U-Bahn shafts that Linck explored in the second issue. Each volume is monothematic and image-driven: the first collected urban street photography from his travels, the second descended into the literal underground of cities like Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin, and the third documented abandoned buildings and lost places across eastern Germany, from the Harz mountains to Halle and Leipzig. Issue four was a collaboration with his father, Oswald Lange, introducing photographs and poetry — a family affair. Issue five took Linck on a train journey through Eastern and Southeastern Europe, capturing street scenes in black and white across Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Skopje, Sofia, Bucharest, Chișinău, Odessa, and Kyiv.
There is no editorial team, no advertising, no distribution deal. uebergrund is available through Linck's website and a handful of shops in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. Each issue sells between 150 and 200 copies — a number Linck considers a success. The magazine exists because one photographer decided that his images deserved the weight of paper and the permanence of ink, and that somewhere out there, a few hundred people would agree.
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