✝ Timm Ulrichs (1940-2026)

Born in 1940, Timm Ulrichs was a spontaneous and surprising guest, as well as being artistically compelling, at the German Photographic Academy (DFA) and its annual conferences in Leinfelden-Echterdingen and Hamburg. He had also been a co-opted member since 1988. He would usually turn up unannounced and at short notice. During his active years, he would arrive laden with the latest catalogues and current printed matter, and intervene in ongoing debates with his own unusual contributions – only to disappear again as inconspicuously as he had appeared. Yet Timm Ulrichs was there! He was noticed. Through his contributions of words and images, he enriched the Academy’s work.

A lasting example of this is his 'Checked Baggage', a series of X-ray photographs taken in 1975 and 1987 showing the contents of random passengers' suitcases at Hannover-Langenhagen Airport. 'Timm Ulrichs uses photography like a pocket knife – to carve, pierce, impale, reflect, dazzle, mark...', wrote Jörg Boström in his 1989 essay on his colleague in the catalogue for the DFA exhibition 'Document and Invention: Photographs from the Federal Republic of Germany 1945 to the Present'. For Timm Ulrichs, photography was both the medium and the subject. His landscape epiphanies from 1972 and 1987 are unforgettable: Cibachrome photos of slide ends. He was also a regular guest at the Bielefeld Colloquia on New Poetry from 1978 to 2003, just as he was at the DFA. Here, too, he constantly surprised his audience with works situated in the realm between word and image, and their unique interplay. Significantly, the conference organisers always gave him 'the last word' – the final lecture on the last evening of the conference – as a special gesture and as a matter of policy. Timm Ulrichs died in Hanover on 29 April this year.

Gottfried Jäger

Bielefeld, 05.06.2026