When I work on this series, getting a picture may take me hours of walking around without even looking in my camera. It’s not always easy to catch the flow and get in tune with the world, but I have to always believe that it will happen again (as it happened before), and I will suddenly just see the pictures and it will be simple. It takes less than a second to take a photograph, but the process ...

Most of what I do comes from an inherent fascination with the constant flow of visual and emotional impulses that surround us in the everyday world. Photography helps me move through my surroundings as openly and with as much attention as possible. To me, this picture of a blade of grass at the side of a busy road, and the mark it leaves on the dusty glass panel behind it, is much more than a ...

Our community manager interviewed Tina Farifteh, one of the talents Der Greif nominated to join FUTURES in 2022. They spoke about Farifteh's practice and her upcoming plans for 2023. Tina Farifteh (1982, Tehran/Iran) is an Iranian-Dutch photographer and filmmaker based in the Netherlands. She has an interest in how we organise the world, and how we perceive the world—within man-made power ...

The interior of a room influences people's lives. Research has shown that it is a basic human need to be able to see further than the next corner. Only then can man escape a dangerous situation. The corner of the room plays an important role in the composition Treibgut: like stranded flotsam, the protagonist sits in the corner of a run-down garden shed. It is broad daylight and the improvised ...

The composition Wall shows another room within a room, a room as shelter or prison. This time the protagonist has built a shelter in the shower and prepared himself for the night. Repeatedly it is about the retreat into the interior, the retreat of the soul into the snail shell. The essence of my photographic studies always lies in the inner exploration and in the disclosure of psychological ...

In the composition Niemandsland from the work series Kokon, the cold, draughty and dark attic embodies the tense and fragile inner life of the protagonist. I was inspired to create this image by the song Push the Sky Away by my favorite musician Nick Cave. This song describes my innermost feelings after the Coronavirus broke out and I received the diagnoses of depression, post-traumatic stress ...

People are far too often lonely and far too rarely alone. People who are forced into loneliness because of a life crisis very often despair. But there are also people who seek self-imposed loneliness in order to find themselves or because they can no longer hear their own voice. Like all the images in the series Kokon, this composition also depicts the search for the inner self. This time the ...

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 Mårten Lange is working on a wide ...

The short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman inspired me to create the picture composition of the same name. The story is about a young woman who seeks relaxation in a summer house. As time goes by, however, the room with the yellow wallpaper increasingly frightens her. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” said Sir Winston Churchill. I abstract this mutual ...

We periodically invite our alumni, artists we have featured in the past, to share their new work and projects with us.

The composition Papier from the series Kokon symbolizes the importance of books for human self-discovery. In the performance, the protagonist sits in an otherwise empty room to discover the wisdom and truth in the printed word. He is immersed in Robert Louis Stevenson's short story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to explore the question of identity. I was inspired by the book Cleaver ...

The term "cocooning" describes a new tendency to increasingly withdraw from society and the public sphere into the domestic environment. It is a basic human need to create a protective space and shield oneself from the outside world. Children, therefore, build caves because they need a place to retreat to. This is the basic essence of my photo series Kokon, which I have been working on since 2020.

The room alone is not enough to give people a sense of security and safety. Only the designed and lived room forms the home. A person's living space can also be seen as an extended body, so to speak, with which the person identifies with his or her real body. The intimate connection between the human being and the room is shown in the way he is influenced by the room and his being changes ...

We periodically invite our alumni, artists we have featured in the past, to share their new work and projects with us.

Most of my creation and thinking comes from the confusion I face in my life and expressing my desire for life is one of my sources of motivation. When I am in an intimate relationship, I realize that both parties sometimes impose their will on each other, and the other party will choose to accommodate, in order to maintain this relationship. I think this is common in intimate relationships, and ...

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 Gabby Laurent’s personal photography ...

Augustine described love as desire or longing, which is often associated with death. When people set a time limit and unit for love, they often use words like “infinite” which is the embodiment of love as desire or longing. Nevertheless, good things are doomed to disappear, and desire is always associated with death. When love is abstractly understood as the embodiment of all good things, its ...

Robert Morat is the gallery owner and founder of Robert Morat Galerie. The gallery pri­mar­ily fo­cused on emerg­ing artists in con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy and photo-based art. Founded in Ham­burg, the gallery has since moved to Berlin and is now lo­cated on Lin­ien­strasse in the Mitte art dis­trict. Morat was a guest curator for Guest Room in 2015. Francesca, our Community Manager, caught up ...

For some physical reasons I can't go out to shoot very often, and I stay at home most of the time. During my long time at home, I start to find some other meanings for the objects in my life, and there is no doubt that those meanings are given by me. I put those objects together as I wanted to, to say what I wanted to say.

I adore writing and photography a lot, and sometimes I tell a story in both ways, which makes me realize something interesting; pictures and words have the same obscure and romantic elements in conveying information. Someone's sentiment is complex, and sometimes it is difficult to tell them in a logical way, but obscurity and abstraction can solve this problem.

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 Pixy Liao’s work has garnered ...

I would like to break things with obvious symbols and reorganize them. The stacking of different elements can always produce something new. What prompted me to do this is that the current world is chaotic and pluralistic and the old order in the past is constantly broken. What is different from the previous world is that each of us is establishing our own rules at the moment, which is of course a ...

Sometimes I look up at the moon, thinking about the difference between ancient people and us. In ancient times, many myths and legends about the moon were born. At that time, the moon was a god, in charge of water and growth. Now we only regard it as the nearest planet and just want to get on it.

As the sun began to set, golden light shimmered across the delicate wings of a butterfly that had become ensnared in a cobweb. My wife Ellie was quick to point out the beauty of the scene, urging me to capture it with my camera. As I focused on the wings, I couldn't help but be reminded of the photograph of my mother's hands, and the fleeting nature of life. With Ellie's hand serving as a ...

Our community manager interviewed Thana Faroq, one of the talents Der Greif nominated to join FUTURES in 2022. They spoke about Faroq's practice and how she utilizes writing in her work.