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2023 DFA Conference | Mannheim
Mannheim
This summer we invite you to an additional conference in Mannheim! Please reserve the weekend of 19-20 August when DFA members and invited guests will present their photographic work for discussion. In parallel, we will stream selected lectures LIVE on Facebook.
Museum Zeughaus, C5 15, 68159 Mannheim
Since the mid-1990s, Claus Stolz has been developing special photo-artistic processes.
For his heliographs, Stolz points his recording equipment, equipped with huge converging lenses, directly into the sun and damages film or photographic plates by extreme overexposure. The radiation energy causes the material to bubble, burst, melt or crystallise. The results depend on the type of film used, the shooting and processing parameters.
Stolz's group of works of light pictures shows old, photographically reproduced photographic plates, whose backside halo protection layer often has a special painterly appearance, which is not visible when processed properly. A material-historical search for traces.
In his most recent series of works, Kammerspiel, Stolz combines grown and produced materials in diverse settings, the ephemeral with the enduring, and condenses some motifs into tableaus of fluidly merging fragments through special cross-fades. These hybrids raise the question of the extent to which the terms "real" or "fake" still play a role today.
Claus Stolz (*1963) lives and works in Mannheim. Studied at the Freie Kunstakademie Mannheim (1988-92) with Gerd Lind, Wolfang Reindel and Rolf Schneider. Exhibitions in numerous museums and institutions, including the Grassi Museum Leipzig, Photo Edition Berlin and the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg. Book publications include Sunburns (2009) and Kammerspiel (2022), both published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. Since 2016 lecturer for photography and fundamentals of perception at the Freie Kunstakademie Mannheim.
Under the same sun' by the artists Carolin Lange and Dico Kruijsse is a large-scale of more than 120 cyanotypes in the entrance area of the BUGA 23.
The installation was developed in forest areas in and around Mannheim over a period of two months. The work was created as part of the 'Reallabor für renewable photography', a collaboration of the Biennale for Contemporary Photography and the Kalamari Klub - with the curator duo Christoph Wieland and Nicolas Reinhart - and the BUGA 23.
The point of departure for the artistic work of Carolin Lange and Dico Kruijsse is the experimental history of cyanotype - the study of light - and its application as a blueprint in architecture. Cyanotype is considered one of the few, comparatively environmentally friendly processes in analogue photography. Lange and Kruijsse use the process to take light photographs in buildings and in nature. They create photograms of light and shadow on a scale of 1:1 in situ. Experiments with techniques and exposure times make temporal and spatial relationships of light and space visible and try to capture the experience of a place as a monochrome-blue negative.
The artists Carolin Lange (*1986) and Dico Kruijsse (*1988) have been working together since 2015. since 2015 on the art project 'under the same sun', which has been exhibited internationally,
at TENT Platform for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Berlin. Carolin Lange is currently undertaking a PhD at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University Leicester as a fellow of the 'Midlands-4-Cities Doctoral Training Partnership' and the 'Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds' on John F. W. Herschel's spectral photographs with plant dyes.
The internet with personal net portals has largely crippled the classic photo book sector. In principle, inexpensive graphics programmes and digital printing make it possible to publish books from just a few copies. Thus, publishers are no longer needed. All the work now falls on the producer side: curating the content, layout of text and images, budgeting, publishing and distribution.
In the presentation, appropriate products/content, qualities/printing techniques and financing possibilities/sales markets will be discussed on the basis of own projects from the field of photography.
The speaker has been making books for over 30 years, in the past for classical publishing houses, today in professional digital printing, with regard to pre-press almost everything in personal union, and thus knows the profession and its changes quite well.
Fritz Franz Vogel (*1957 in Lucerne) has been working since 1992 as a cultural scientist, art and photo historian, editor and curator productively, cooperatively and interdisciplinarily in the media of text, photography and books. Research, teaching, publications and exhibitions in the fields of staged and documentary photography, popular and free theatre, image studies and visualistics, art history and exhibiting, alphabets, body images and erotica.
In her works with the overarching title TIME LOOPS, Anett Stuth photographs, collages and decollages pieces of nature, plant and animal objects, remains from the recent and prehistoric past. In her groups of works, she condenses the reflection on the sublimity and simultaneous destruction of nature.
In her photographic collages, historical and contemporary pictorial materials/replacements of nature are brought together and placed in relation to our present civilisation.
In contrast, Stuth removes all superfluous information from the large-format photographs of animal and plant objects in the decollages. Detached from origin and time, they seem like mute, frozen witnesses of transient diversity. The interplay of collages and decollages opens up new spaces for thought in the form of time loops.
In response to the first Corona Lockdown in spring 2020, photographer Ingmar Björn Nolting began a road trip through Germany. This took him around 25,000 km across the country over the span of a year. During these unusual journeys, Nolting photographed a personal and comprehensive document of life in times of global crisis. His photo project "About the Days Ahead" reflects German society between collective isolation, fear, despair and the longing for an improvised normality. It was published as a photo book by Verlag Kettler in February this year.
Ingmar Björn Nolting (1995) lives and works as a freelance photographer in Leipzig, Germany. He studied photography at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, is a member of the Laif agency, a member of the supervisory board of the laif cooperative and a founding member of the DOCKS photo collective. Nolting was a fellow of the Stiftung Kunstfonds and his work is part of the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund.
From a graduate in business administration to an expert in historical photographic processes: An Odd Journey to an Unexpected Destination.
The photographic autodidact Christian Klant reports on his switch to the analogue side of photography and how this has permanently changed his perception of portraiture and landscape. Using past and current projects as examples, Klant shows why the time-consuming work with darkroom tent on location and hours of print sessions in the lab are more than just a means to an end.
Christian Klant is a specialist in handmade, analogue photography.
Nature and values such as mindfulness and authenticity are the common thread in his artistic work. In 2022 he published his second book "Places of Resonance Research projects on Gustave Le Gray for the Rijksmuseum and print projects, among others, enrich his work.
As a BFF Professional, co-editor of the Art Lab Podcast, trustee of the Stiftung Photographie schwarzweiß and deputy spokesperson of the German Photo Council, he is committed to photography. Klant is also an appointed member of the DGPh and his work is exhibited internationally.
After Anja Engelke recreated well-known photographs and lived in a painting by Stephen Shore, her current works "The Falling Soldiers" (2022) and "Sleeping by the Dataflow" (2023) deal with photographic history by means of artificial intelligence. Her interpretations of the works of Robert Capa and Alec Soth humorously show the "view" of AI on our society and are the subject of the lecture.
Anja Engelke lives and works in Bremen. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. In 2020, her book Room 125 was published by Kerber Verlag.
The steam pile driver is working on the construction site. As early as the 1920s, the underground was being built here at Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Franz Biberkopf wanders over the mega construction site and still they mumble and mumble at the Alex.
A dancer dances at the foot of the construction crane, the astronaut strides towards the Alex. The former House of Statistics is being gutted and played with by artists. Will the mighty television tower fall victim to the terrible storm? Will the actress in the remake of 1920s Berlin die?
In front of the fiction "Berlin Alexanderplatz", the building site appears as a stage, as if it could spill over into the square. The night descends. The illuminated letters ALLESANDERSPLATZ shine across the square, visible from afar. In 2015, the House of Statistics was brought back into the public discourse in an art action. Now, community-oriented living and art space is to be created here. The redesign of Alexanderplatz is open.
Müller studied photography at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in the class of Arno Fischer. In 2003 he published his diploma thesis "Karat. Himmel über St. Petersburg" as a photo book about street children in St. Petersburg. Supported by sponsorship awards, he was able to produce long-term projects such as "Mingong. The Search for Happiness" as a photo book about migrant workers in China. Under the impression of the Corona pandemic, he temporarily interrupted his international photo projects and turned to the film project "BERLIN. ALLESANDERSPLATZ".
"The little ones in the front, the big ones in the back, the wedding couple in the middle ...": In a group photo, the photographer determines the line-up. At a state reception, at a meeting of heads of government, the protocol determines. The group photo is not a pure document but more or less a staging. In my group photos, the staging is not completed with the duck on the shutter, but only with the completed post-production, with the analogue or digital post-processing. From 2014 to 2023, 10 DFA group pictures were created, photos of the participants of the DFA general meetings.
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Claudia Fährenkemper photographs huge and tiny objects with the aid of scanning electron microscopes. This results in fascinating and at the same time disconcerting photographs. Playing with extreme scales, fantastic visual worlds are created: American desert and canyon landscapes, machine giants of German open-cast lignite mining, insects, plant seeds, crystals and plankton as well as armour of European and Japanese cultural heritage. For the first time, works from forty years of artistic creation are juxtaposed in this lavishly designed book. The synopsis of Fährenkemper's most important conceptual series of works reveals surprising interlocking of subjects with completely contradictory themes and dimensions from nature, technology, science and cultural history.
Claudia Fährenkemper (born 1959 in Castrop-Rauxel, lives in Steinheim/Westphalia) first studied art and geography for the teaching profession, then photography at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences with Arno Jansen and free art/photography at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover. Her photographs are in numerous museum collections, including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada and the Margulies Collection in Miami. She is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.
