June 13, 2025
Online-Release
Interview
Armin Linke and Max Dax in conversation
Armin Linke, Greenhouse, El Ejido, Spain, 2013
Dax: Armin Linke, behind each of your motifs lies a hidden context that reaches far beyond what is superficially visible. Your photos function as a kind of interim result or visualization of an invisible interest behind the images. To what extent do you still consider yourself a photographer?
Linke: I still primarily see myself as a photographer. However, photography for me has long become pragmatic. I proceed systematically—like a chef who is constantly engaged in processing, fermenting, producing broths and sauce bases. In short: I follow a system. I continuously produce building blocks and modules from which I—or someone else—can construct something larger: an exhibition on a particular topic or a book. These images are constantly challenged by new contexts, by various strategies, by different exhibitions. It sometimes becomes almost like a collective process, where an exhibition turns into a laboratory inviting different people, collaborators, and co-authors to develop narratives with the images. My two-dimensional photographs become a kind of storyboard through spatial juxtapositions, where it’s no longer about the individual image but about sequences of images. In this way, the conditions of image production are also questioned. It’s no longer solely about the image itself or its content, but also about the media infrastructure involved in its creation—and thus questions of authorship. The images may be mine, but the composition and therefore the narrative might be by someone else. I see the image as a starting point for discourse, for conversation.
Armin Linke, 2023
Could you perhaps explain this using the example of your exhibition Image Capital, which was shown at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Fondazione MAST in Bologna? This traveling exhibition, which was conceived and presented differently at each location, dealt with photography as a storage and information technology.
The exhibition is a good example because I didn’t conceive it alone, but in dialogue with photo historian Estelle Blaschke. Image Capital, as the title suggests, is about images and their value as recording and reproducing media. The exhibition mainly features photographs from research, industry, and surveillance, made by machines—images from the field of information technology that no longer have a clear authorship. They are like blind spots. Yet, it is precisely through them that we can read our society well, because our society provides the conditions for their production. These images—almost always managed via image databases—are produced, stored, bought, and sold. And the strange thing is: hardly anyone ever sees these images, and yet they exist. In the Netherlands, for example, near Delft, there is the production site of Greenhouse, a company that produces around eight million orchids every year. An orchid takes between one and one and a half years to grow. During this entire period, the plant is continuously photographed in a fully automated process to monitor its development. Photography here functions purely as a monitoring tool. The company, Ter Laak Orchids, uses AI to oversee and optimize the orchid production process. At the end, the mature orchid is photographed from various angles, and artificial intelligence determines its selling price and target market. In the end, there are images, 3D models, the physical orchid, and its economic value—which, of course, differs across markets. In Southern Europe, slightly opened orchids are preferred, while in Northern Europe, closed ones are favored. This would be a materialist reading of photography—one without an author.
That reminds me of Joseph Kosuth and his work One and Three Chairs. The piece consists of a chair, a photograph of a chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair.” The work includes the premise that it’s basically irrelevant who took the photo of the chair.
And it points to the arbitrary and banal nature of linguistic definitions. The orchid is an aesthetic object that repeatedly appears in art history as well as in literature. But it is also an industrial product. In the exhibition, we show this photo of the orchid, along with a film and a written text. The exhibition itself is a staging that brings all these levels together—Blaschke’s research findings are shown alongside my photographs. I photographed in the greenhouses, capturing both the orchids and the surveillance technology in large formats and presenting them as a triptych, making them part of a spatial installation. Interestingly, the exhibition began with a conversation that Estelle and I gave at the Centre Pompidou, which focused on operational photography. We were then invited to develop the theme further at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, where we created a modular system to relate different image motifs to one another. This eventually led to the invitation to the Folkwang Museum in Essen, where we expanded this modular practice.
Armin Linke, Ter Laak Orchids, greenhouse production line, Wateringen, Netherlands, 2021
Armin Linke, Ter Laak Orchids, camera sorting technology, processing, Wateringen, Netherlands, 2021
So your photography becomes a kind of puzzle piece or module within a larger exhibition context, where it's only peripherally about the fact that your photographs might also be for sale.
That’s correct. Of course, such a triptych or a framed photograph can still be purchased. And magazines can still buy and publish my images to illustrate articles. But that happens far less than it used to, simply because there are hardly any magazines left. That’s also why my images increasingly appear in essayistic contexts. They are curated by others to form new narratives—in books or exhibitions. What’s striking here is that my images are no longer presented as standalone works of art on white walls; increasingly, they appear as sequences, as agglomerations.
The image becomes a kind of evidence or contextual image?
Yes, but still the image remains itself, even if it is exhibited more performatively or in a more staged way than before. In Stuttgart, for example, there were display cases left over from a previous exhibition. These cases, which are usually arranged horizontally to present objects like books, I set up vertically and hung my photos inside. By grouping three print strips together and placing them in the vitrines, I aimed to define the photographs as three-dimensional objects—to call attention to their materiality.
The presentation had something sacred about it.
I was interested in the tension that arises between the materialization and the dematerialization of the images. At the same time, there is also a reference to the institution where the images are shown, because we go into their depot, open it up, and reuse objects. This turns the exhibition into a laboratory—a situation that is not predetermined but emerges site-specifically and collaboratively.
Armin Linke, 2023
And what kind of insight does that generate?
Insight always comes when images undergo a kind of media transfer. My motifs can almost always be quickly linked to basic existential issues that concern us all—especially because the motifs often only become visible through my photographs. In a way, they’re brought from invisibility into visibility. This has to do with the fact that, in recent years, I’ve systematically photographed subjects that reflect the state of the world—from architectural structures that alter river courses, to greenhouses where monocultures are cultivated, to the office of the President of the Italian Republic. When the images are co-curated and connected to elements from the exhibition site, a personal and site-specific agenda is added to the context. An exhibition then reconnects to a space and to a local audience.
How can we imagine this kind of site-specific reconnection in the example of the Centre Pompidou?
When the exhibition finally came to Paris, we wanted to engage directly with the city. Within walking distance of the Centre Pompidou was the huge construction site of Notre-Dame. The architects responsible for the reconstruction faced the problem that they lacked reliable 3D renderings or building plans. During my research, I read in an article that a level of the video game Assassin’s Creed takes place inside Notre-Dame. The game developer Ubisoft had rendered Notre-Dame using various data and made it available for the reconstruction. However, this data proved unusable for the architects. My research then led me to the team of Livio De Luca, a researcher who had developed a program to photogrammetrically scan, identify, and classify every fragment that had fallen to the ground during the fire. In the end, however, it was the data of a deceased university professor—who had photogrammetrically documented Notre-Dame with his students as part of a research project—that proved decisive. De Luca’s team found the data on hard drives in the professor’s estate. Thanks to this precise mapping, each piece of debris could be clearly identified. In all these different reconstruction efforts at Notre-Dame, photography played a central role. Photography became a time machine. And by including this method of photography in the Paris exhibition, Estelle and I created a strong local connection. That’s what I mean by “docking”—when I speak of the tension between photography and the physical space of an exhibition.
Armin Linke, Chantier scientifique Notre-Dame de Paris, Groupes de travail Bois et Données numériques. Notre-Dame de Paris Scientific action, Wood and Digital data working groups. CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), MC (Ministère de la Culture), EPRNDP (Etablissement Public chargé de la conservation et de la Restauration de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris), laboratory for the acquisition of photogrammetric data, Paris, France, 2023
Armin Linke, Notre-Dame de Paris Scientific Action, Wood/Carpentry Working Group, vault housing charred timber remains, Paris, France, 2023
Photogrammetry is set to transform our understanding of photography because the data for three-dimensional reconstruction is inherent within the two-dimensional image.
Strictly speaking, photogrammetry is nothing new in photography. Even in the 19th century, people used it—photographing architecture or landscapes from many different angles in order to later create a three-dimensional representation. Photogrammetry essentially emerged together with photography. Today, it forms the basis of video games like Grand Theft Auto, where we move freely through three-dimensional worlds and constantly shift our perspective. Our screen has a flat surface, but we navigate in a three-dimensional space.
So, in what way does photogrammetry correspond to natural human vision?
As humans, we have two eyes. By combining two similar but slightly different images—originating only a few centimeters apart—our brain can calculate a three-dimensional perception of the space we’re in. And that’s essentially how photogrammetry works. Of course, it’s also used for military purposes—such as calculating and optimizing the trajectories of weapons, where, for instance, a flying bomb scans its surroundings in real time photogrammetrically.
Armin Linke, Whirlwind, Pantelleria (TP), Italy, 2007
Let’s return to the role of photography in your work.
In my exhibitions, photography is always the foundation and starting point—a kind of bait to open discourse and integrate photography into different exhibition strategies. At the same time, I also work in a very classical way, because I mostly shoot in medium format, which is still a demanding practice. I primarily see myself as a photographer, even if the situation has become much more complex and opaque than it was, say, 15 or 20 years ago.
You speak and argue like a forensic investigator.
That might be true, but I do hope that I’m seen as a poetic forensic observer of nuance. I’m interested in the poetic clues within the medium I use. I increasingly ask myself how images are even used in our society today. My first film, Alpi (2011), dealt with how we can still perceive a landscape like the Alps—a landscape that has been depicted for centuries in art, tourism, and advertising. The film doesn’t show the landscape itself, but rather how it is represented. It takes on a similar role to a book or an exhibition. Such a film—or a book—is more like a collection of evidence than a judgment.
Armin Linke, EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), model of the Alps, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2001
One of your most famous and well-known image series is about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, China. You undertook a strenuous and complex journey to China to take those photos, having yourself accredited as a photographer by a Milan-based construction company in order to gain access to the site. The resulting images are monumental—almost overwhelming photography, given the sheer scale of the subject. Would you consider this poetic-forensic work?
Even in that project, I wasn’t only interested in the classic monumental image. Already back then, I was concerned with the people who were not in the frame and with the massive—yet invisible—infrastructure required for the dam’s construction. A city of one million people had to be relocated, and workers were brought in from distant regions across China. They had to work under conditions they had no power to negotiate. Beyond the impressive motif, I was interested in these infrastructures and in the invisible social and psychological consequences of the forced resettlement of large parts of the local population. What forms around the dam? What new economic and societal structures arise when such a massive project is carried out?
And that’s exactly what you do: you travel the world to document, in thousands of elliptical repetitions, different facets of humankind’s will to conquer nature. You mentioned your film Alpi, but also your books, your archive, and the exhibitions you no longer hang alone in your galleries as an artist—but always collaboratively, with co-curators from very different disciplines.
Yes, perhaps it took a certain amount of time and a certain critical mass of images—a kind of productive chaos—for me to evolve in this way. But at the same time, it was always important for me to show in my images that places like the Three Gorges Dam aren’t simply exotic locations on the other side of the world. On the contrary—they are deeply connected to us and globally networked. It wasn’t just Italian companies from Milan involved with finance and engineering services. Siemens Germany supplied enormous pumps for the dam. Many international consortia participated in the construction. These highly complex, technical structures, which might initially appear exotic and isolated in the landscape, reveal upon closer inspection that they are, in fact, bridges of global interconnection—a hallmark of our 21st century. This way of working began about twelve years ago, when the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin—then under the direction of Bernd Scherer—invited me to contribute my images to an exhibition on the Anthropocene. That was really the starting point where the process of reading and assembling images became more important to me than merely showing photographs in an exhibition.
Armin Linke, Ertan Dam, downstream side, Panzhihua (Sichuan), China, 1998
So the Anthropocene exhibition at HKW marked a beginning?
Yes, it was in that moment that I realized my images contain potential tensions that want to be brought to the surface. I was actually surprised myself that it was precisely the theatrical means of staging that were able to bring out these latent tensions in the photographs.
One important exhibition that built on Anthropocene was The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, curated by Peter Weibel in 2016 …
Yes! In that exhibition, we changed the setting every one or two months—just like in theater, where you have different acts and stage designs. Accordingly, we also integrated sound and invited various participants to interpret the images. The idea at ZKM was that although the photos were framed like in a gallery show, they were hung on mobile walls—the kind used in opera or theater as movable backdrops. This created a tension between fiction and documentation. I played with the temporal and spatial scales of theater. The team consisted of six people—designers, scenographers, and sound designers: Jan Kieswetter, Giuseppe Ielasi, Alina Schmuch, Heike Schupelius, Martha Schwindling, and Linda Van Deursen.
Armin Linke, PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen, installation model, Milan, Italy, 2016
Armin Linke, ZKM Karlsruhe, The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen, installation view, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2015
Is this desire to document the Anthropocene scenically and variably also a way of pointing out that, despite all the documentary coldness and detachment, these images still reflect the perspective of Armin Linke, the auteur?
Certainly. And there’s also a certain irony—as if the utopia of the future being depicted is already outdated the moment it’s captured by the camera. That would be the Sisyphus effect: humanity continuously tries to build something new, while at the same time destroying what was once new. The entire effort carries a certain absurdity. Despite their often impressive subjects, I try to ensure my images are not celebratory but also capture the grotesqueness of human existence.
You’ve taken so many photographs in your life—several million—that you now rely on curators to go through your archives, to tag them and generate new ideas about how to form clusters and navigate your image corpus. To what extent have you perhaps already lost track of your own work, especially as you constantly produce new exhibitions and also continue photographing for future projects?
In some ways, I do lose track. But at the same time, interesting retroactive connections sometimes emerge. What’s important is that I tried from the beginning to archive all my images carefully—not in a bureaucratic way, but like a complex editing table.
What does such an editing table look like?
In the past, during film editing, the reels were organized and hung on a line so you could quickly access the material and try out an edit on the table—just to see whether a counter-shot worked or not. Editing was a bit like improvisational music, where the musicians always have their repertoire within reach—able to access it intuitively while being technically secure enough to try new combinations. In this sense, I never feared producing too much, because from the beginning I also searched for methods to stay on top of my production. It became a bit more complicated when film production was added—when the audio and time dimensions entered the archive of images. But the different media also made it more interesting.
Armin Linke, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (KHI), Photothek, Florence, Italy, 2018
There are more and more machine-made images—like those from outer space—that record frequencies we can’t perceive, or from the deep sea, where the images aren’t captured by lenses but by sonar waves moving through water. To decode and visualize them, you need computer software that can calculate and interpret those waves. The key point is this: today, images are datasets—not negatives. Today’s astrophysicists don’t even work with images in the classical sense. They work with vibrations, just like in music.
The same applies to language! During our Image Capital discussions, Estelle Blaschke and I began to explore how the financial capital of images no longer lies in the image itself, but in the text connected to it. Once again, an invisible image.
Exactly. I’m referring to how artificial intelligence learns from the way we humans describe images with words—on Instagram, WhatsApp, and elsewhere. This media transfer between language and image is of great interest to big tech companies working with big data, because it allows them to develop algorithms that translate images into language—and vice versa. These images are systematically fed into AI systems. In the end, the capital is no longer the image—it’s the text, the metadata. The metadata produced with every image is what really interests these companies and drives further development. It’s fascinating to realize that an image in photography has always also been a form of writing, a carrier of information. From the very beginning, photography has lived in this tension between image and text.
Because I work in the field of art, I can decide how my images are distributed—and that’s a fundamental part of the artistic process. Being aware that I’m not just producing an image, but also determining how it will circulate.
That’s exactly the challenge. It has truly become difficult to teach photography as a medium today.
In recent decades, our understanding of photography has fundamentally changed. Mainly because the camera has become part of our body—it’s always at hand, integrated into our phones. Phone cameras are like exo-prosthetics. The images we produce can be shared and published instantly, or even generated by machines. When I started out, I could define myself as a photographer based on a certain investment. I bought a large-format or medium-format camera like a Rolleiflex or a Hasselblad. I invested in a tool, learned to master it so completely that I could forget the technical side and focus entirely on my ideas and on developing a personal visual language.
That’s no longer necessary—or even possible—to the same extent. Today, the questions are: Why am I producing this image? How do I distribute it, process it? Can I program the algorithm so that it creates from my image what interests me? Do I use open-source algorithms—or ones hidden inside a tech company’s black box? What are the ethical implications of the technical choices I make? And maybe, in the end, the goal isn’t even to produce images myself anymore—but to find them?
Armin Linke (b. 1966, Milan) works as an artist in the field of photography (and film), initiating processes that analyze the medium, its technologies, narrative structures, and entanglements within broader sociopolitical frameworks. His work raises fundamental questions that reach the limits of photography—authorship, the concept of the archive, technological developments like photogrammetry, and their impact on how we understand photography today.
He is especially regarded as a photographic chronicler of the Anthropocene. On countless research journeys, he has documented visual evidence of sites and places where humans actively shape the planet, geography, and society.
Max Dax (b. 1969, Kiel) is a publicist, curator, and photographer who has long operated at the cultural intersections of art, literature, and music—including as editor-in-chief of the magazines Alert, Spex, and Electronic Beats.
With the kind support of the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf