DÖRTE EISSFELDT. Prix Viviane Esders 2025

DÖRTE EISSFELDT

Born in 1950 in Hamburg, Germany, Dörte Eißfeldt is a prominent figure in contemporary German photography, whose body of work explores both the formal and conceptual potentials of the photographic medium. Trained at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, she taught in various institutions before being appointed, in 1991, as Professor of Fine Arts and Photography at the renowned Braunschweig University of Fine Arts, a position she held until 2016.

Eißfeldt’s artistic practice questions the status and processes of the photographic image. “For me photography means working with fragments of reality, experimenting with acquired material in an analogue or digital photographic process with the purpose of establishing a distinct and intense, yet also open connection to the world. Allowing all that is wild, dark, intangible and beautiful in an image to preserve or to achieve its impact, in an open, stimulating and surprising form, very large or very small.” She manipulates light, chemistry, and paper through analogue and hybrid processes, confronting traditional techniques—solarisation, montage, multiple exposures—with new digital technics.

Among her key series, Generator (1987–1988) and Schneeball/Snowball (1988) have drawn particular attention. In Schneeball, based on a single photograph of a snowball in the palm of a hand, Eißfeldt creates numerous prints, varying the light, scale, and tonality, leading the viewer from a cosmic spectacle—a sphere tumbling in darkness—towards a more intimate experience. Later, the series Haut/Skin (1991) plays with these opposites in the antonyms of soft/hard, light/dark, glossy/matt, front/behind. The pointed edge of a knife dominates the centre of each image, its peak in direct contact with the skin. The point of potential injury marks the thin line between shape and substance, between fact and phantasm, aggression and tenderness. For Agfa Brovira (2011), the backs of exposed prints on vintage paper were digitally photographed in the studio in bright sunlight, a reverence to analogue photography in the indifferent field of the digital. In HimmelHimmel/SkySky (2017), she explores chromatic and spatial illusions through seemingly perfect digitally mastered photos of real skies.

Through these projects, Eißfeldt pursues a profound quest: to go beyond simple representation to reveal photography as a processual object —one whose materiality, technical history, and conceptual tension shape a visual world that is both poetic and reflective, always marked by surprise and intensity. Since 1971, her work has been exhibited in numerous national and international institutions and galleries. Her photographs are held in several museum collections. She has published twenty artist books, including the recent Stehen Liegen Hängen (2024, Distanz), which lays the foundation for her new project The Experimental Archive, aimed at examining her archive through a process of review and recreation of her work.

Prix Viviane Esders