H. said he loved us

H. said he loved us grew out of three years of travel and research into the former German Democratic Republic and the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. Tanini mixes documentary photographs, found images, and literary references into a fictional narrative that follows the stories of five people who lived under Stasi surveillance, presented as a patchwork of collected documents, autobiographical notes, and anonymous portraits. The images are deliberately stripped of names and specific places, giving the book a timeless, placeless quality that pushes the work toward psychological rather than documentary territory: a study of the dread and oppression particular to living inside a state built on suspicion. Designed and published by Discipula, the collective Tanini co-founded, the book was printed on Tatami paper in an edition of 800 with a soft cover and Swiss binding. It won the Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2015, the 2014 Premio Pesaresi for Contemporary Photography, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Anamorphosis Prize.