In Focus: "Mit Euren Spuren"

From the latest photobooks picks by Der Greif, discover a book from Munich-based queer photographers’ project “Mit Euren Spuren”

“In Focus” is Der Greif’s photobook review series, spotlights our picks from the current open call for submissions and our community artists' most recent publications. This month, we bring out of our selection “Mit Euren Spuren”, a book and an interdisciplinary photography project that brings together six photographers from Munich with eight LGBTQIA+ seniors. Over the course of a year, Munich-based photographers and creatives Teo Apostolescu, Mara Fischer, Francesco Giordano, Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert, Florian Tenk and Stella Deborah Traub documented their encounters through photographs, texts, and the artistic processing of archival materials to learn from the achievements of previous generations and to make the queer heritage visible.

In 1994, after more than one hundred years in the German legal code, Germany finally abolished Paragraph 175, a statute that had criminalized male homosexuality for over a century. Originally enacted in 1871, the law was intensified under the Nazi regime and strikingly persisted in various forms across both East and West Germany after 1945. Three decades after its repeal, the men who navigated this era of state-sanctioned discrimination now comprise Germany’s generation of queer seniors.

It is to them that “Mit Euren Spuren” (https://mit-euren-spuren.de/home-2025/) (German for “With Your Traces”) turns. The photobook gathers the works of a group of queer photographers based in Munich, each paired with a queer senior over the course of a year. Published by DISTANZ Verlag in 2024, its launch coincided with the 30th anniversary of Paragraph 175’s abolition. The project, first conceived by photographer-filmmaker Stella Deborah Traub and photographer-curator Francesco Giordano in the summer of 2023, was structured from the beginning to foster sustained, long-term, intergenerational exchange rather than brief photographic encounters.

The encounters process for the project was a multifaceted endeavor that relied on a combination of institutional networking, community outreach, and digital navigation. Giordano notes that finding participants for such a long-term commitment "was not the easiest task," a challenge that forced the team to remain agile and creative. While some connections were forged through established historical channels, such as meeting Sabrina Berndt via the Forum Queeres Archiv in Munich, other participants were reached through targeted open calls sent to local lesbian organizations and the gay seniors' group Gay and Gray. When traditional outreach stalled, Mara Fischer, the book’s designer, turned to modern social infrastructure, meeting Kornelia Kohler through a dating platform while ensuring it was "clearly communicated from the very beginning" that the interaction was for the project. Ultimately, this approach was essential to the project's success, as Fischer observes that the team "ended up using very different strategies" to assemble their cohort of participants.

The difference between the photographers’ approaches reverberates through the work. Giordano knew of Sabrina before they began working together on the project. He had originally imagined working with a gay couple until Sabrina, a renowned Munich-based trans woman asked to be part of it. Fischer, photographing Kornelia Kohler, leaned into a more direct affinity. "She is a lesbian older woman, so I can relate to that experience in some ways," Fischer says. Josef Wolfgang Ohlert already had access to his project partner Richard Grammel, with whom he had already been living for some time as his primary carer.

What emerged from these encounters is a book of six chapters, one for each photographer and their subject, introduced by name and year of birth. Giordano photographed Sabrina at home, at friends' places, and walking the dog in the streets of Munich. “It felt important to show her more private side," he mentions. Fischer, instead, wove images of herself alongside Kornelia’s portraits, in a dialogue bridging the past and present experience. Across all six chapters, archival material is layered onto and displayed alongside the portraits. Some of it has been lent by the seniors themselves; the rest comes from the Forum Queeres Archiv.

“We received materials from all the protagonists. These included old photos, portraits, and letters. And then we went to the queer archive in Munich, where we found historical material: newspapers, articles about AIDS, and a map of every gay and lesbian bar in the city centre,”– explains Giordano, while Fischer notes that political statements from newspapers were also coming into the combination of materials.

“We couldn't take anything home from the archive,” – adds Fischer – “so I brought my own scanner. It was so intense, I remember feeling like I had been there for a month. Actually, maybe it was three or four days of nonstop scanning of documents.”

As if this process could leave a mark on the book itself, the front cover carries a pinkish-red bleed produced by negative scanning, a tint that also reappears on the inside of the book on a double-page spread. Giordano describes the archival layer as the book’s red thread. In “Mit Euren Spuren”, the archive is neither purely decorative nor purely informational, but rather the echo of the legal oppression that conditioned the lives of the protagonists and so many of their generations.

When reflecting on the experience of the protagonists of these encounters, Giordano highlights the ‘empowerment’ they felt: the fact that they were given the space to tell their stories. As most of them part of the senior’s queer community of Munich, they are from the same generation and surrounded by people their own age. The project filled that gap between generations in a way bringing them in connection with younger people to share stories and experiences with.

“Mit Euren Spuren” returns to Munich at mim – Raum für Kultur for an exhibition during Pride Month the latest iteration of a project that continues to activate itself. Past exhibitions incorporated spreads from the publication directly onto the gallery walls. In others, Traub's filmed interviews, in which photographers and protagonists answer the same set of questions, were installed on facing monitors. Perhaps the project’s most interesting activations took place inside Bavaria's retirement homes, where small exhibitions were accompanied by conversations between makers and protagonists.

All photographers are still in touch with their project partners. Giordano still sees Sabrina Berndt around Munich; he and the other participants are sometimes invited to brunch or similar events. “It’s not just the project," he says. "It's, like, friendships.” In this sense, “Mit Euren Spuren” might be less a record of the photographic encounter than its afterlife: the book, in its form, helps preserve this exchange, which seems to run deep in both directions.

Explore more of our community photobooks here. Check out the recent Artist Feature by Constanze Han to see more on transgender communities and photographic encounter and read on Roxana Rios’ practice rooted in queer representation and performativity.