Editing Challenge organised by the German Photographic Academy
Wolfgang Zurborn vs. Nina Poppe
featuring images by Tjefa Wegener
moderated by Prof. Dr Claude W. Sui
ZOOM meeting on 21 September 2026 at 7 pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89024990054?pwd=QsaD7oIjaadRucuK6t7uWeuEiYbA96.1
Meeting ID: 890 2499 0054
Passcode: 846947
The Editing Challenge can also be followed live on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/deutschefotografischeakademie/
A full recording of the Editing Challenge will be published as a video on YouTube. The link will then be available on the DFA website.
In this Zoom talk, Nina Poppe and Wolfgang Zurborn will present their book designs featuring the works of Tjefa Wegener from the ‘Alpsommer’ series and discuss the results with the photographer and the audience. The photobook professionals will explain, step by step, how they arrived at their edits for the publication, in order to make the process of book design – with all its questions regarding content and form – easy to follow. In all previous DFA Editing Challenges, it has already been very clearly demonstrated how much the way we read photographic images depends on their arrangement within a book, and how differently our perception of the world around us can vary as a result.
Tjefa Wegener (born in Basel in 1986) is a freelance photographer specialising in portrait, nude and documentary photography. She lives and works in Basel and the Swiss mountains. After studying at the Ostkreuz School in Berlin (2008–2011), she won the German Youth Photography Prize for the work diary accompanying her final project, which dealt with her own termination of pregnancy. Her documentary journeys took her to Mexico and back to Switzerland, where she spent each summer working as a dairymaid in the mountains, documenting life in isolation. Her reportage ‘Alpsommer’ was shortlisted for the Kolga Award and was exhibited in Tbilisi in May 2026.
Nina Poppe was born in Münster. She studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Utrecht and documentary film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her first photo book, *AMA*, about Japanese free divers, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2011.
She works in the fields of photography and video for clients in Germany and abroad, and is represented by the Robert Morat Gallery in Berlin and the Focus agency in Hamburg. Alongside her own artistic work, in which she pursues a documentary-experimental approach in short films and photography projects, she initiates and curates numerous exhibition projects with a focus on photobooks. In 2014, she co-founded the PhotoBookMuseum in Cologne. Since early 2023, she has been teaching photography at the Hanover University of Art and Design. Nina Poppe lives in Cologne.
Wolfgang Zurborn, born in 1956, studied at the Bavarian State College of Photography in Munich and at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. In 1985, he was awarded the Otto Steinert Prize by the DGPh, and in 2008 he received the German Photobook Prize for his book *Drift*. Exhibitions of his work are held internationally. For 40 years, he has been a co-director of the Lichtblick Gallery in Cologne, and in 2010 he founded the Lichtblick School. A key focus of the teaching programme is the design of photobooks. Together with Markus Schaden (The PhotoBookMuseum), he supports participants in regularly held workshops with the publication of their photographic projects. Renowned publishers have subsequently published many of the photobook dummies produced in these workshops.
