Reviewers

“Photography casts a lasting spell on the beholder when the distance between the image and the beholder can remain intact, in other words a metaphorical strangeness prevails and identification must take place by detours.”

Training
1979-1985 Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and the University of Stuttgart (Art History)

Teaching
1996-1999 Photography and Drawing, Free University of Graphic Design/Fine Art Freiburg
1999-2003 Photography, University of Design, Pforzheim
2009/2010 Deputy professorship in Artistic Photography, Academy of Fine Arts Saarbrücken

Exhibitions
2015 tief blicken, Hanna Nagel Preis 2015, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe (solo exhibition)
2015 Mapping the Museum, Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken (group exhibition);
2015 Et in Arcadia Ego, Museum Kurhaus Kleve (group exhibition)
2014 Instrumenta Sceleris, Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (solo exhibition)
2014 Turn Round, T66, Freiburg (solo exhibition)
2014 Das große Reinemachen, Kunsthaus im KulturQuartier, Nürnberg (group exhibition)

Since 1987 Funding and awards.

Consultative focus
Object photography, spatial shots and street photography

“There are masses of visually and topically interesting positions in today’s documentary photography. An outstanding and relevant visual argumentation or story needs noticeably more than ‘just’ good topics and images. It’s becoming more and more important for authors’ positions within their stories to be precise and critically visible. ‘What can I do?’ is one of the core questions at the same time.”

Lukas Einsele is a fine artist and photographer. He is a lecturer on the Camera Arts course at Lucerne University (cameraarts.ch). Einsele studied German language and literature, theatre sciences and philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, later photography at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.

When tacking political, social and humanitarian topics Einsele makes use of artistic and documentary strategies, concentrating on the media of photography, video and text. Important working methods include collaborations with and among persons involved in image generation, performative forms and rules for shaping an encounter. He investigates recollection as an independent act, as an active, image-generating process which people use to produce a relation between themselves and their surroundings and make these surrounding their own.

Lukas Einsele has received grants from, among others, the Kunstfonds, the Hessiche Kulturstiftung, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Kunststiftung NRW and the Bild-Kunst collecting society. His book “One Step Beyond” was distinguished with the German Photobook Award and the Karl Hofer Award of the Berlin University of the Arts. He has been nominated multiple times for, among others, a fellowship at Villa Massimo, for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Prix Pictet. His works have been exhibited at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, Museum Haus Esters Krefeld, Martin Gropius-Bau Berlin, Museum of Communikation Frankfurt, Kunsthalle Mainz, Bildmuseet Umeå, Fotografisk Museum Malmö, UN Visitors’ Center New York, as well as worldwide at numerous Goethe Institutes.

In his current project, “The Many Moments of an M85 – Zenon's Arrow Retraced” Lukas Einsele examines the trajectory of a cluster bomb from the site of the explosion back to the engineers who developed the weapon and, with the aid of photography, text and extensive research, documents the people who were in contact with the weapon and equally the events and places where this took place and the relations of persons, events, places and the cluster bomb to one another. “The Many Moments of an M85 – Zenon's Arrow Retraced” was exhibited, among other places, in 2010 at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and in 2012 at Fotomuseum Winterthur.

Consultative focus
Questions on positioning within one’s own projects, photographic strategies, co-authorship, and more.

“Documentary photography tells stories of the world, influenced by the author’s searching-subjective gaze. It defines an attitude to the world and pursues the question how the world’s construction becomes graspable in the image.”

Alexandra Lechner is a photographer, a co-founder of the Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie and a member of the curator team of RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain.

Following her training as a photographer she studied photographic design at the University of Darmstadt from 1993 until 1998. Since then she has been working as a freelance photographer in Frankfurt in the field of People, Portrait and Corporate Photography for advertising/PR agencies, editorial teams and companies, and she is a professional member of the BFF, the professional freelance photographers’ association, and a film designer. Since 2006 she has been teaching as a university lecturer on a regular basis, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, for example. In addition to commissioned photography she is represented in exhibitions with her freelance photo projects.

Consultative focus:
Documentary photography – on deployment for commercial applications, for example corporate photography, and search for/discovery of artists for the Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie.

“Today’s hybrid forms of documentary photography, between ‘documentary style’, photojournalism and what’s left of authenticity in art, are greatly contributing to a new visual culture of world and image reception.”

Frederic Lezmi, born 1978, is a photographer and book designer.
Following studies in communication design with the focus on documentary photography and book design at the Folkwang University in Essen and a Master at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, in recent years he has been living as a freelance photographer and book designer in Istanbul.

He is the initiator of the Book Lab in Istanbul as well as a co-founder and curator of The PhotoBookMuseum in Cologne.

Consultative focus
Photobooks / Printed Matters

Dr. Esther Ruelfs has been director since 2012 of the Photography and New Media Collection at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg. Prior to that she worked as a freelance curator and from 2005-2009 as a scientific employee at HBK Braunschweig.

In 2008/09 she curated, with Tobias Berger, the 3rd Fotofestival Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg. Numerous exhibitions and publications on contemporary art, including “When we share more than ever” (2015), “Fette Beute. Reichtum zeigen” (Kerber 2014), “Rollenbilder – Rollenspiele” (Hirmer 2011), “Images Recalled – Bilder auf Abruf” (Kehrer 2009), “Fotografische Leidenschaften” (Marburg 2007).

Claude W. Sui has been director and curator of the Forum for International Photography of the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums in Mannheim since 2002. He studied art history, philosophy and ethnology at the universities in Mainz and Frankfurt am Main and earned his doctorate on the work of the photographer Robert Häusser.

Sui is in charge of the scientific compilation of the contemporary Helmut Gernsheim Collection, for the Robert Häusser Archive and the Reiss siblings’ collection of historical travel photographs. Among others, Sui has curated the following exhibitions at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums: “Focus on Man, Pictures of People from the photographic collection of Helmut Gernsheim” (2003), "Robert Häusser, From the Photographic Work 1938–2004“ (2006), “Robert Lebeck - Unbelievable Luck“ (2004), “To the Holy Lands – From Mecca and Medina to Jerusalem”, Photographs of the 19th Century (2006), “Set into the Word – Contemporary Lyric Poetry to Photographs by Robert Häusser” (2007), “Robert Häusser – The Diary of Moor” (2008), “World Stars of Photography: The Winners of the Hasselblad Foundation” (2008), “Robert Häusser – The Berlin Wall“ (2009). „The Birth of Photography, Milestones from the Gernsheim Collection” (2012). In this exhibition the first ever photograph "View from the Window, Le Gras" taken in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce was shown for the first time in over 60 years in Europe and exclusively at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen in Mannheim.
Sui was appointed as Jury Chairman for the Hasselblad Award 2010 of the Erna- und Victor Hasselblad Foundation, Göteborg (Sweden).

Henrik Spohler was born in 1965 and studied at the Folkswangschule/University of Essen.
From 1992 he worked as a photographer for magazines such as Geo, Der Spiegel, das Zeitmagazin or Brandeins – as well as for the corporate communications and advertising sectors. On the arrival of the year 2000 Spohler commenced a series of groups of works that have been exhibited and published in book form (0/1 Dataflow, Global Soul, The Third Day, In Between). He has been teaching since 2009 as a professor at the Berlin University of Technology and Business on the Communication Design course. His multi-award-winning works are represented in public and private collections. He lives with his family in Hamburg.

Consultative focus:
Artistic documentary photography

“The longer I've been dealing with the medium of photography, the less and less clear it’s becoming to me how the term ‘documentary photography’, or ‘or documentary-style photography’ as Walker Evans coined it, should be understood. Virtually every photograph has an inherent testimonial character per se; at the same time, though, a photo is also just one of an almost infinite number of viewpoints on our world. The term suggests a neutral viewpoint, but in most cases this is not present as long as the photos are taken, selected and viewed by people.”

Damian Zimmermann, born 1976, is a freelance art critic focusing on photography, and a photographer, blogger and festival maker.
He writes, among others, for Photonews, Photographie, Der Standard, Die Tageszeitung (taz), Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and Artnet. Together with Nadine Preiß he photographed between 2010 and 2012 the project “Paare – Menschenbilder aus der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts”, which will be published in autumn 2015 at Kettler Verlag.
Since 2013 he has been a partner of the platform “Internationale Photoszene Köln”, which organizes a photography festival in Cologne every two years.

Consultative focus
Artistic/conceptual photography in series form for exhibitions/photobooks. Always on the search for exciting positions and new perspectives.

Thomas Schirmböck has been director and curator of ZEPHYR – Raum für Fotographie in Mannheim since 2005.
Zephyr is an exhibition space that is devoted primarily to contemporary photography. Since spring 2005 Zephy has realized its multifaceted programme of international contemporary art in numerous solo, group and topical shows on its own premises and in the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums.

Following studies in European art history, archaeology and political sciences in Heidelberg, Thomas Schirmböck built up the municipal photo gallery Alte Feuerwache in Mannheim from 1996 to 2004. From 1996 to 1999, in addition, he taught at the University of Mannheim.

His most recent exhibitions include FotoChina (2006), my vision – Ideen für die Welt von Morgen (2007), Spurensuche, Polizeifotografie 1946–1971 (2008), Paolo Pellegrin, As I Was Dying (2008), Sascha Weidner, Am Wasser gebaut (2009).

Consultative focus:
Thomas Schirmböck is interested in conceptual photography, in photographs that are socially relevant and have a connection with contemporary history.