And she goes down | DER GREIF

Varun Gupta & Arpan Mukherjee

Guest Room

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Varun Gupta, Director of the Chennai Photo Biennale in India, is teaming up with one of his personal mentors, Arpan Mukherjee. He is one of the nation's leading researchers of historical photography processes and co-founded Studio Goppo, a photography research studio. Together, Varun Gupta and Arpan Mukherjee have developed the following theme for your ...


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Owen McCarter

Artist Feature

The river winds through the hills like a caught snake. It's dark body, twisting back and forth. It’s mouth is always open, always swallowing. I remember when we made our own fishing rods and caught trout in the bend by the old church. We returned home beaming, holding their lifeless bodies like treasured silver. It was then that we learned more about our river, that we had killed the animals, ...


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Celebrating World Cyanotype Day 2023 with Issue 15 Guest Editor Janelle Lynch

Articles

We’re featuring what our Issue 15 guest editors have been up to since the issue was released at Paris Photo in November 2022. Each of our 50 guest editors on the issue selected an image by an artist from our international open call to feature in a spread next to an image of their own in Issue 15. To see their work in the issue, order your copy. Our guest editor Janelle Lynch’s work is made with ...


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DER GREIF
DER GREIF
Open Call:
Guest Room: Damarice Amao & Matthias Pfaller

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Damarice Amao, associate curator for photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has decided to team up with photography historian and curator Matthias Pfaller. Together, they have developed the following framework for your submissions: “Empathy”. Submit before the deadline on October 19th. In relation to our 15th anniversary, we are implementing a Guest Room Scholarship, sponsored by MPB: an artist stipend of 1.000 € to one of the selected submitters of each upcoming Guest Room. For the chance to be awarded a stipend submit now to this open call. Supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit.

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Things to Remember

Artist Blog by Owen McCarter

Here is a bibliography of sorts. A few of the stories and thoughts that influenced me and my practice during the creation of my project “Et in Arcadia ego”. Each one informed my perception of the river and my attempts to document it. As someone who spends most of their time thinking in images, I often struggle with words. With that in mind, this list may be a more informative description than ...


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Arcadia

Artist Blog by Owen McCarter

The project's title, “Et in Arcadia ego”, is a reference to Nicolas Poussin’s moralized landscape painting of the same name. Poet Théophile Gautier describes the piece, “The picture of the Shepherds of Arcady expresses with a naïve melancholy the brevity of life and awakens among the young Shepherds and the girl who look at the tomb they have found, the forgotten idea of death.” Arcadia and its ...


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Notes on Practice

Artist Blog by Owen McCarter

I began photographing the river by reconstructing memories. Rather than just photographing a site of contamination, I was placing my body, and that of those I grew up with, within that site in the same manner as when I was a child. These re-enactments conjoined with documentary images acknowledge the inherent fiction within my perception of the environment. As time went on it became clear that a ...


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The Three Eyed Fish

Artist Blog by Owen McCarter

With Industrialization, the landscape of the Housatonic River began to shift dramatically and by the late 1800s thirty dams were in place. Iron and paper mills boomed with no thought towards the environmental effects they might cause. The river was now a source of not only agricultural wealth, but a vast and exponentially growing industrial power. In 1885 William Stanley Jr., an electrical ...


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Domesticity (ongoing)

Artist Blog by Eva Gjaltema

For almost 20 years I have been taking pictures with my Polaroid SX 70 camera, the only camera I have been very loyal to. Every now and then I have been taking pictures of my direct surroundings, mainly focusing on nature, still life, and portraiture. It's a silent camera with incredible charm and poetry. Since the birth of my daughter in 2019 I have been working on a long-term project called ...


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Patchwork (2017)

Artist Blog by Eva Gjaltema

"Till death do you part" is a phrase that applies to fewer and fewer marriages these days, which means that more and more parents and children are growing up together in a new family construction - the so-called patchwork-family. Constantly confronted with a family history in which I was not involved from the beginning, I have been trying to find my way within my new family in Germany as a ...


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The First Three Years (2018)

Artist Blog by Eva Gjaltema

I seriously started to implement the technique of collage within my art practice around 2015, as I was working on the series 'Sehnzucht’ and ‘Sehnzucht: The Remix' (later published as the book ‘The First Three Years’) around the theme of motherhood. I was mainly working with my old Polaroid SX 70 at that time, creating beautiful but also static images. Since the images were not always expressing ...


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Der Greif X MPB: Behind the Image with Valia Russo

Articles

Artist Valia Russo, the recipient of our Scholarship for the Guest Room “Photography and Drawing”, gave us an in-depth look into his practice. Valia Russo lives and works between Paris and Arles, and graduated with a Master's degree in photography from the National School of Photography, Arles, in 2022. Der Greif Guest Curators Heather Canlas Rigg & Emmy Lee Wall nominated the young artist for an ...


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Interdependency (2023)

Artist Blog by Eva Gjaltema

Parallel to the collage series ‘Hiding/Hidden’ I started working on a series around the nature of relationships. I wanted to address the underlying power structures within relationships and make this tension visible. How we are dependent on each other, but at the same time searching for our independence. Being married to a man and having two kids, I really noticed during the Corona pandemic how ...


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Eva Gjaltema

Artist Feature

Throughout history, women have faced numerous obstacles when it comes to showcasing their talents and abilities. Societal rules and expectations have often limited their opportunities and prevented them from reaching their full potential. Unfortunately, these societal limitations have had a lasting impact on women's self-confidence and sense of worth. Many women have internalized the message ...


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On obsessive searching

Artist Blog by Maria Siorba

This ongoing work aligns with some thoughts and philosophical questions that are continuously dancing in my mind: Are some of us on an endless quest of searching because our perception is distorted? Or, are we residing in a dishonest and challenging-to-trust environment? For instance, I struggle to distinguish my feelings from those of others, making it difficult to understand them, despite my ...


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Catching up with Issue 15 guest editor Roger Eberhard

Articles

We’re featuring what our Issue 15 guest editors have been up to since the issue was released at Paris Photo in November 2022. Each of our 50 guest editors on the issue selected an image by an artist from our international open call to feature in a spread next to an image of their own in Issue 15. To see their work in the issue order your copy. Our guest editor Roger Eberhard’s work focuses on ...


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On sharing and transparency

Artist Blog by Maria Siorba

I perceive touching as a means of both understanding and immersing oneself in the world of others. It's a language of communication that transcends verbal expression, inviting us to both offer and receive through tactile exploration, with its unique ability to illuminate the inner, dark parts of the other or whatever is or isn’t there. The deeper the obscurity, the higher the concentration of ...


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On reading

Artist Blog by Maria Siorba

When reading a book with your finger, concentrating on a line requires you to cover the line underneath and ignore the line above. There is almost no way to go through the entire text at the same moment. I believe the process of 'reading' someone operates in a similar manner. You are never exactly where the other person is standing. In order to see how they see things, sometimes you have to ...


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Maria Siorba

Artist Feature

“Blank Verse” focuses on the subject of observing and searching deeply within the soul and inner landscape of others, as we embark on a journey of self-discovery. The images draw inspiration from a melancholic feeling that arises from the difficulty to understand and trust others or our own senses, while this question is frequently flickering in my mind: How does a modern, dishonest environment ...


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Revisiting the Phenomenon

Artist Blog by Yuxi Wang

Toast sewn with delicate ribbons, a chess set made of colorful haribos, spots on the skin in the shape of pearls, a grapefruit lifted in mid-air… As I designed and took these strange, bright, and somewhat decadent photographs, I surprisingly began to feel clearly that the emotions of these re-perceived objects were like a river, trickling through my body. From my fingertips to my chest, to behind ...


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Am Having Fun

Artist Blog by Yuxi Wang

Photography is probably a habit and a form of relaxation for me, which has the same healing power over me as the feeling of music playing in my ears and the back of my head. Surrounded by the beat of the drums, my body surges in a tidal wave. For a moment I am transported to another world, roaming in circles and even drawing new life energy from it. I admit that my approach to photography is not ...


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Present Tense

Artist Blog by Yuxi Wang

I am prone to fantasies, often imagining a richer picture of an everyday view, thinking about the possibilities. Based on what I saw, I tried to visualize these outlandish ideas in my mind through Photoshop. In "Esthétique de la photographie," François Soulages refers to the characteristics of photography as "photographicity". In his definition, “photographicity” is an unexpected combination of ...


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Collaborator's Corner: A Q&A with Marie Gomis-Trezise

Articles

In 2020 Marie Gomis-Trezise teamed up with David Uzochukwu to curate an edition of our Guest Room. Marie Gomis-Trezise, a groundbreaking creative force, is renowned for her adeptness in scouting exceptional talents. Initially founding GALERIE NUMBER 8, with a focus on photographers predominantly from the African diaspora and global south, GALERIE NUMBER 8 championed artists who confront cultural ...


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Boundless Bliss

Artist Blog by Yuxi Wang

The concept of "Lasting Longer Than an Instant" is excerpted from the novel "The Age of Learning" by Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung. This book accompanied me during my time as an exchange student in Taiwan. One example in the book illustrating this concept is drawn from a poem by W.B. Yeats: While on the shop and the street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It ...


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A Rainy Evening in Berlin

Artist Blog by Yuxi Wang

One rainy evening, I stood at the top of a hill overlooking all of Berlin. The air was moist and cool, and the world seemed to be holding a hint of mint candy. Droplets of water whipped by the breeze rested on the edges of lime-green leaves, shaking. The blue of the sky was sinking, and in the distance were interlocking shades of blood orange and pale yellow, a large pinkish-purple cloud was ...


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Yuxi Wang

Artist Feature

Pour the liquid into the glass slowly, the top of the glass will gradually bulge upward due to the tension of the water to form a circular arc. Each time more liquid is injected, the arc rises a bit, and finally reaches the moment when it is about to overflow. Such transient moments always keep me immensely curious. I tried to preserve the subtle and dynamic experience by photographing and ...


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Other Places to Which I’ve Been

Artist Blog by Russ Thompson

Every photograph is a dislocation. The camera takes a moment of light and removes it into the abstract space of images. Yet because of this, every photograph is a possible relocation. What interests me most about photography is how each photograph is an indelible reference to the real while also suggesting a multitude of realities beyond the frame. When I gather together photographs I am pruning ...


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Basilisk Prayer

Artist Blog by Russ Thompson

A few minutes into the video the jocular, 1950s-inflected voice cheerily suggests nuking the Mojave desert - ashing all those iconic not-trees and glassing the dunes - to build a straighter highway. The art direction is excellent: a crater composited over the desert floor followed by the dark schematic of a highway boring through the map of California. I see it. I let my camera eat it. When I ...


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Q&A with PhMuseum Director Giuseppe Oliverio on PhMuseum Days Festival 2023

Articles

We sat down with Giuseppe Oliverio, the Director of PhMuseum, to delve into the heart of the upcoming third edition of PhMuseum Days and its compelling theme, "I Don't Know How To Respond To That." Oliverio spoke with us about the inspiration behind the festival’s theme, citing the ongoing surge of attention around artificial intelligence (AI) as a catalyst. He underlines how the festival aims to ...


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