DER GREIF
DER GREIF
DER GREIF
Open Call:
Guest Room: Heather Canlas Rigg

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Heather Canlas Rigg, who is part of the curatorial collective ma ma and Artistic Director of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, has decided to collaborate with Capture Photography Festival's Executive Director Emmy Lee Wall. Together, they have developed the following framework for your submissions: "Photography and Drawing". Submit before the deadline on June 22nd. One artist from this open call will receive our Guest Room Scholarship, sponsored by MPB: an artist stipend of 1.000 €.

Submit

Bindi Vora

Guest Room

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Bindi Vora, photographic artist, associate lecturer at LCC, and curator at Autograph London, along with Justine Ellis, photographer and co-director of Perimeter Books, have decided to join forces. Together, they are currently working on Bindi Vora's upcoming book "Mountain of Salt". To guide the submissions for their Guest Room, Bindi Vora and Justine ...


Continue Reading

Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

Artist Feature

"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."- Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor) "It is this very illness, ...


Continue Reading

Greif Alumni: Kristina Knipe Rewilds Photography at Copenhagen Photo Festival

Articles

The 1-11 June 2023 will be the 13th time that the Nordic region’s largest photography festival will take place. This summer, the festival puts photography on the agenda under the theme Rewilding. Photographs will literally be blooming all over Copenhagen and southern Sweden via exhibitions, workshops, talks, portfolio reviews, and social events. In the festival center on Refshaleøen, six solo ...


Continue Reading

Masks and Projections

Artist Blog by Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

“Under this mask, another mask” – Claude Cahun I am a ghost, no one really knows me. What they make sense of is through these words, which they may read or scroll through based on their prejudices and privileges. But this is all I must share. The mask I had to adopt was first due to me being discarded by many and now this very mask is my sword. This “mask “ takes many forms in my work, and ...


Continue Reading

The American Fairytale

Artist Blog by Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

America is not a dream. It is a land full of contradictions. It is as real as reality could get. And then in this vastness, is a chaotic spot, a mirage called New York. As Baudrillard once remarked, “the number of people here who think alone, sing alone, and eat and talk alone in the streets is mind-boggling. And yet they don’t add up. Quite the reverse. They subtract from each other and their ...


Continue Reading

The Logic of the Lure - An “Archive” of Desire/An “Archive” of Proximity

Artist Blog by Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

“Entirety exists within me as exuberance in an empty longing, in the desire to burn with desire” - Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche I am not just an observer, but also the very subject of this desire through which I seek the other. To photograph, for me, is to further this desire, to give it a semblance of love, an unspoken promise of togetherness, friendship, and intimacy. And to also come ...


Continue Reading

Love, Christina (a letter from my sister) — excerpt 3|3:

Artist Blog by Rana Young

“It troubles me that we carry her characteristics and traits. I’m comforted only by the fact that we have the capacity to love ourselves and others. No matter what she held back from us, we developed a conscience. I’ve yet to meet someone who can say the same thing about her. When I think of her, my thoughts consistently drift back to you. I did know her. I do remember her laughter, her smile, ...


Continue Reading

Issue 15 Guest Editor Hoda Afshar at the New V&A Photography Centre

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. Nine works from our guest editor Hoda Afshar’s ...


Continue Reading

Love, Christina (a letter from my sister) — excerpt 2|3:

Artist Blog by Rana Young

“I wouldn't allow myself to go through everything. She is dead. I can't ask her why she did this to us. Even if I could, would she be honest about it anyway? Why do I still want an answer? Why do I want you to have an answer? The memories waft in like a rancid smell and linger in the air, and I search for the source, but can't find it. As I begin to investigate, the scent dissipates. Yet, always ...


Continue Reading

Love, Christina (a letter from my sister) — excerpt 1|3:

Artist Blog by Rana Young

“I am struggling. If, at some point, this becomes rambling, forgive me. My thoughts are scattered as of late. You are the only person I share my thoughts with, and I know you will accept however this turns out. Last weekend, perusing through albums and paperwork I found of hers, I was again in a tug of war with our mother. I don't write out her name because that gives her form, and I don't want ...


Continue Reading

Rana Young

Artist Feature

My earliest memories are without my mother; she chose to physically abandon me for 16 years. Emotionally, for much longer. Our fleeting and estranged relationship ceased when she passed in late 2017. My curiosity, rage, grief, and empathy collide and swell alongside her archive I’ve amassed. I uncover and confront perceptions and symptoms of familial truths and hereditary traumata while gazing at ...


Continue Reading

Interno, the book

Artist Blog by Valerio Polici

Previewed during the Fotografia Europea Festival in Reggio Emilia, Interno is now also available as a book published by Studio Faganel, an art gallery and publishing house. The book can be purchased from their website. The idea was to create a minimal and elegant product that, in keeping with the spirit of the work, was as open as possible. For this reason, there is no real beginning or end, ...


Continue Reading

Studies on matter

Artist Blog by Valerio Polici

These are my first experiments in analogue manipulation, which respond to a need to establish a more material contact with my production. It is a form of extension of the increasingly close contact I seek with what I photograph. Touch is a decisive sense in experiencing the world, and it seems to offer me privileged and deeper access to things. After many years of working digitally, the ...


Continue Reading

Untitled

Artist Blog by Valerio Polici

Still in the making and without a title, this work was taken on several trips to Sardinia. After the first lockdown was over, I started a collaboration with an American agency, taking virtual tours all over central Italy. In my free moments, I shot a lot without a precise direction, hungry for something new after months of confinement at home. Quickly, the focus shifted exclusively to that ...


Continue Reading

Col Tempo

Artist Blog by Valerio Polici

A portrait of old age resulting from an artist's residency in a hospice in Matera on behalf of the social cooperative Il Sicomoro. Subterraneously guided by Giorgione's work (Vecchia), in which a scroll reads the words "Col tempo" (With Time), hence the title, I imagined a possible translation of the woman's harsh and dramatic gaze, which I found difficult to sustain for a long time. Despite ...


Continue Reading

Greif Alumni: A Q&A with Community Members Federico “Monty” Kaplan and Marisol Mendez

Articles

Our community members Federico “Monty” Kaplan and Marisol Mendez have both had their work featured in our Guest Rooms. Together they recently won the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 in the Professional Environmental Category for their series “Miruku”, which explores the intersection of climate vulnerability and gender inequality. Through a compelling series of images, it portrays the struggles ...


Continue Reading

Ouverture

Artist Blog by Valerio Polici

Initially commissioned by the Napoli Teatro Festival Foundation and later completed during the Roma Europa Festival, Ouverture is a project that portrays the spectators before the beginning of the show. It takes the shape of a reversal of meaning, in which the public becomes the protagonist of a hypothetical, ambiguous, and unlocatable performance. Consistent with my photographic practice, I ...


Continue Reading

Valerio Polici

Artist Feature

Interno is ideally an open work in which, without using a script, I tried to construct a story made up of images alone. Wandering through many interior spaces, hence the title, until losing the sense of the perimeter, letting the photographs suggest hypothetical stories one after the other through free associations. I was intrigued by the idea of giving life to a mysterious universe generated ...


Continue Reading

Humans on the Marshes - Thames Estuary, England 2011-2018

Artist Blog by Oliver Martin

Historically the Thames is how people from Europe and the rest of the world came to London; it has been one of the most important trading points on the globe. It’s an area of docks, farmland and Industry that attracts people from all over Europe. The first picture I made for this project is on the Hoo peninsular; it’s close to London but felt so remote; the thing that struck me was nature, its ...


Continue Reading

Influences

Artist Blog by Oliver Martin

Whilst making this project, I looked at the work of photographers working with similar themes: Sam Contis’s Deep Springs, (2017), Raymond Meeks Halfstory Halflife, (2017) Gregory Halpern, Omaha Sketchbook, (2019), Collier Schorr, Americans #3 & #1, (2012) and Catherine Opie, High School Football 2007 – 2009. I want to talk a little about vulnerability and the work of photographer Catherine Opie ...


Continue Reading

Archive

Artist Blog by Oliver Martin

In this post, I will share Archival images that helped inform the project. This first image (Puig, 1900) shows a very different landscape to the one today. This little cluster of pines was the first to establish itself and would soon dominate the forest. Before the pines, the forests comprised slower-growing Alzina (Holm Oak) and Garrofer trees. Large areas of this original forest were cut down ...


Continue Reading

The DINAMO Team reflects on dergreif.org’s Diatype typeface

Articles

By DINAMO Thanks to winning a grant from Kultur.Gemeinschaften, we are pleased to announce the revitalization of our extensive online archive. We worked with Berlin and Oslo-based NODE design studio to conceive and design the concept. Berlin-based Ungroup creative practice implemented the code to revolutionize the Der Greif experience and Swiss type design agency DINAMO supports us with ...


Continue Reading