A rather unconventional photographer, curator, teacher, art-collector and publisher, Wilhelm Schürmann was one of the most influential pioneers of photography in Western Germany in the 1970s and 80s. He began his photographic career with self-taught black and white photography in the far West of Germany, capturing the mostly dull villages around Lüttich and Aachen in his own straight ahead but humorous way. After exhibitions in Hannover and Bonn, Klaus Honnef called him one of the most important photographers in Germany at that time, naming his style a "kind of road-photography“.

In "das nötig", Schürmann exposes urban motives in photos that show Cologne, Düsseldorf and other places in the Rhineland as well as artists that were en vogue at the time, like Kippenberger or Cindy Sherman. Combining documentary photography with entertainment makes his work stand out as uniquely today as it did in 1990 when this now extremely rare title was published.