Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the history of art in the German Democratic Republic continues to be rewritten. When it settles, Thomas Steinert's photographs will surely have an iconic place. Steinert and the DDR were born the same year - 1949 - and from the age of 20, the artist began the series that now emerges as a powerful chronicle of the unravelling of communism, as seen from the perspective of Leipzig's Connewitz suburb. Shown neither in official nor underground galleries until 1989, Steinert was always a fringe figure with an outsider's acute sensitivity to nuance and gesture, through which he interpreted momentous social change.

Exquisitely formal in their compositions of stark verticals and horizontals, light and shadow, use of empty space, black and white tonality, these photographs are visually arresting first in a non-narrative context, and only slowly allow their subjects to emerge as a convincing distillation of everyday life. In "DDR1" Steinert depicts workers outside a low-rise computer centre witng on either side of the tram tracks like balletic Giacometti figures, vulnerable, none connecting with the other, dotted across an existential urban stage set. "Garage" is a painterly snow scene of heavy white branches latticed across a decaying hut graffiti-ed into a mock-classical temple. In the street lamps of   "Jahnallee", soaring over modern boulevards, Steinert showed failed hope: "their futuristic design was once the epitome of a communist future that would be as streamlined and gleaming as these lamps".

By the 1980s, Steinert homes in on individuals. Old people dancing in "Volksfest" suggests the end of an era; "Opa's Orden", a child decked out in his grandfather's medals, is prophetic of the decline of communist symbolism into child's play - any visitor to Berlin today recognises how, in the kitsch "ostalgia" of DDR memorabilia, communism is remembered in such a way as to be really forgotten. Steinert's photographs do the opposite.