Daring to see something for yourself

Annette, when looking at your works, this incredible precision immediately stands out. The site of action, of production, is somehow always contained in your pictures. There is no illusion — not even in this shot — that it is a spontaneous moment. Even when something happens in the great outdoors or in a landscaped environment, one sees immediately: This is not a snapshot.

I always consider the photographic moment. There are actually a few snapshots, though. For example, a picture from the Hafengeburtstag (Port Anniversary) in Hamburg: A huge container ship sails past a tiny, wooden Viking ship. That is virtually a snapshot. At the time, I had just been researching the artist Bas Jan Ader ...

... who tragically went missing while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a very small sailboat. That is an almost tragicomic coincidence. Do you just walk around the Port Anniversary with your camera, and suddenly your theoretical research crosses your path in real life?

I went there purposefully because I knew that such moments could happen. And I knew that there would be ships from different eras sailing on the Elbe River, and that different temporalities would collide. But a part of the picture is also chance; the container ship wasn't part of the parade, after all.

This extreme contrast on the water is a good cue. Such shifts in scale and disconcerting relationships stand out quite often in your work. Is this also about a kind of play with our viewing habits?

Scale and dimensions do indeed always play a major role. It is important to me that the pictures have something playful about them and remain open. At the same time, I am also concerned with addressing photography itself. The beautiful thing is that photography has a lot to do with temporality, with the moment the picture is taken, but also always with a connection to reality — what is referred to as an index. At the same time, the image also possesses an autonomy.

Is there a work where this can be specifically pinned down — how did you come to photograph the covers of books that were banned and burned during the Nazi era?

In what form can they be seen there?

Why was this intactness so important to you? Especially with a topic like the book burnings and persecution, one might expect to look for historical traces, the worn or the destroyed. Why was the flawless condition crucial for you?

Are they all first editions that you photographed for Die Bücher?

In 1935, and in the years that followed, the Reich Chamber of Literature compiled the “List of Undesirable and Harmful Literature,” which was updated annually. Was there a specific number you set as a goal for your selection?

The number of pictures shown always depends on the conditions on-site. In Munich, for example, there were 24. That was because I was given a wall—which was 2 x 7 meters large. I finally concluded the series with 102 books.

What immediately stands out: There is no uniform type of cover design. They are all individual.

Oskar Maria Graf is still a familiar name today, but many names are barely known nowadays.

You yourself did not study in Düsseldorf, but in Hamburg, at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK). Why did you choose Hamburg?

I looked at various academies in Germany and then decided on the HFBK because the atmosphere in the city and at the university conveyed a great feeling of freedom. At 20, after graduating from high school, I moved to Hamburg. I was interested in conceptual art, but I started out as a sculptor. As a teenager, I used to go to a youth center after school, where I welded steel sculptures and carved sandstone.

I always enjoyed working directly with materials and letting something emerge physically in space. The relationship between body and space was always important to me, also due to my spatial awareness from ballet dancing and sport fencing, which I then continued to practice for a long time in Hamburg. At the time, I wouldn't have dared to say: What I make is art. That assertion didn't play such an important role for me at all.

As a child, I spent a lot of time on adventure playgrounds, building wooden houses. That's also where I first came into contact with photography: There was a summer workshop, and in the goat barn, which had been converted into a darkroom, we enlarged black-and-white pictures of guinea pigs, cats, and other animals that we had taken ourselves beforehand. It was a magical moment – the experience of recording something and seeing it appear on paper in the dark. Later, I applied to the academy with photographs of self-welded sculptures and with photos of self-made stone sculptures, for which I in turn had used photographs as a starting point.

The interplay between object and image of the object, this playful translation of one medium into another – that appears again and again in your later works. Did that essentially originate on the adventure playground?

I wouldn't want to claim now that there is a direct path leading from the adventure playground to what I do in my studio today. But it was an important experience that pre-shaped much of what occupied me in art afterwards.

The HFBK of the 1990s was known for its highly theory-driven discourse. How did you reconcile this environment with your joy in direct, tactile “making” and your instinctive approach?

I wanted to work with color photography from the very beginning, but at the university at the time, there was only makeshift tray processing for developing C-prints. It was hardly possible to achieve precise or reproducible results with that. It was important to me to be able to precisely control the colors of the photo prints myself. So my friends and I took the initiative: We set up our own lab, bought two enlargers and a used RA-4 Colenta developing machine that controlled the chemical process fully automatically. Our first color lab was in a 12-square-meter storage room in the Hamburg free port, which a musician friend sublet to us. I always see the window of this room when I take the train into Hamburg and am happy every time that we managed to free ourselves from the constraints of the university back then. Today one would probably call that self-efficacy. We didn't know that word back then.

That sounds like an adventure again, but also as if photography – at least color photography – didn't have an easy standing at the HFBK back then.

That's true. Some of the teachers employed there still held the idea that only black-and-white photography could be considered a true art form, while color was rather associated with advertising and applied art. I couldn't understand that, and I didn't care either; I just wanted to make pictures in color.

Wolfgang Tillmans came to the HFBK in Hamburg as a guest professor for a year in 1998 – someone who stood for a completely different approach to photography. What role did he play for you?

The short time he spent at the HFBK provided me with crucial impulses. His perspective and his approach to photography had something liberating, democratic, and he shared his thoughts.He was interested in dialogue and didn't monologue. He saw my work with different eyes than the other teachers; I didn't have to explain much. There was an agreement in our attitude, in how we thought about the world. His understanding of the materiality of images impressed and shaped me.

Cosima von Bonin, who was at the HFBK from 2000 to 2001, played a pivotal role for me. She included me and others as students in her projects and her cosmos virtually from day one, for example in film shoots or in performances in her exhibition at the Hamburger Kunstverein. 

Her conceptual approach and the references in her works definitely influenced me. And it was also wonderful to have a strong and courageous woman for guidance. This form of making things together outside the rigid university structures, and the feeling of freedom associated with it, was extremely valuable to me. I am still friends with many of the former students from the class.

The city of Hamburg was fantastic during this time; I lived in the port district – a lot was happening, the Golden Pudel Club was an important center for us. My first exhibition also took place there in 1999. The Akademie Isotrop organized it in a room where beer crates were usually stored. It was cleared out on Mondays, so the exhibition could take place in the evening. The Akademie Isotrop saw itself as a counter-movement to the art academy, and there were several such groups that organized themselves outside or parallel to the official curriculum. I was also active in various artist groups. With the “Blaue Kugel,” we had a temporary exhibition space in St. Pauli.

From the beer crates in Hamburg to your current studio in Berlin: It is exciting to visit you here, because I suddenly have the feeling that the real space somehow diffuses into your pictures – perhaps it's due to the lighting situation. The Berlin U-Bahn travels on the elevated railway here at Schlesisches Tor almost right past the window, and you mentioned that you sometimes deliberately use the reflection of the sunlight on the passing yellow cars as a fill light for photo shoots. Are all your works created here in the studio?

A lot is created here in the studio. The large windows face north, and through the door to my office, light comes in from the south on the other side of the building, especially in the spring. 

In order to capture the daylight from both sides, I built a wall at an angle in the room — so that I can utilize the light optimally. In the room are a shooting table, studio lights, and a digital camera on a studio tripod. But there are also always shots that are taken outside the studio, like the one of the rider (Untitled, (Rider), 2005), which was taken during my six-month stay in Los Angeles, or the architectural shots of Ludwig Leo's building in the Tiergarten in Berlin (Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau, Berlin, 2018).

I have been working digitally since 2018, but I also still shoot on film. For both analog and digital, I have been working for many years with Susanna Kirschnick and Christine Fenzl, who run the Go Digital lab in Berlin. They are both artists themselves and have become close allies and friends over the years. They possess a great deal of knowledge in handling the material and know my visual language very well. It is a great gift to work with them both, and we are also spatially close to each other here.

You just filled in for Christopher Williams for a semester at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Does it still look the same there as it did in the days of Bernd Becher?

Amidst the equipment and the historical rooms there, I often felt like I was on a journey through time. There are still large-format cameras from the 70s and a Colenta RA-4 developing machine, through which the photo prints of the first generation of the Becher class already passed. That made me very nostalgic. Babette Bangemann, who studied under Bernd Becher, heads the photography workshop there. She can recount the old days. By now, it must be about the tenth generation of photography students there.

Openness, fun, and curiosity about the subject matter. The joy of making pictures, of seeing pictures. That you try out everything that is available, both analog and digital, and use the time in this protected space at the university as well as possible for yourself. You should take your own pictures, come up with image ideas, but also appropriate images by others and question them. Precisely because of the constant availability of photos on the internet and on the screen, which makes all sizes and surfaces the same, it is so important to experience the original and the materiality in the space. You also have to dare to see something for yourself.

The photographic material is fragile. Cindy Sherman’s Legacy Project shows that we need new ways of preservation, for example through authorized new productions. This presents photographers with enormous practical and technical challenges that can hardly be managed individually.

Exactly. I have experienced in my immediate environment, for example with Michael Schmidt and Hans Hansen, how individual, difficult, and complex such processes are. If the necessary structure or the interest from institutions is lacking, important estates like that of Marianne Wex, which is now located at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, go abroad or, in the worst case, are lost. We need an infrastructure here that can handle the complexity of a body of work and can also conserve an estate and make it accessible for scholarly research.

It is a major task to deal with the preservation and continuation of the work alongside the development of one's own artistic practice. And ultimately, it is also about issues of power politics. In a federal institute, history is depicted, shaped, and reorganized. Fortunately, our view of history is constantly changing. Therefore, the structures should also be able to reflect this dynamic.

My hope for a German Photo Institute is that it reflects the multifaceted nature of photographic creation and makes the plurality of photographic content and attitudes visible in the selection of the collected estates.