Beyond Photography

Katharina Sieverding is a renowned photographer whose work over the last forty five years has broken boundaries. She has always been interested in transformations, changes in the developments of both artists and art. Initially trained in medicine, she then turned to theatre and stage design. After working at the Salzburg Festival, political events inspired her to move to Berlin and embark on her journey through art.

At first she worked without a camera or a studio - instead using a nightclub photo booth, creating images that would become famous. It allowed a sense of immediacy, an instant production of the image. In the 1970s she became interested in monumental photography, which included manipulations of her photo booth images. The interest in transformation has always been an important part of her work, embracing film and projection, and she showed us images of the impressive array of machinery and equipment necessary. Working with analogue film involves quite different processes, and creates quite unique results, and despite the explosion of digital technologies there has been a renaissance of analogue techniques in the last fifteen years. Indeed, most galleries are interested in the analogue version of her works.

The role of the studio, Sieverding suggested, is also transforming. She explained the expansion of her own collaborative spaces, redefining studio practices to include different work spaces, archives, spaces for exhibition and even receptions and press conferences. Such space enables a different approach to photography, embracing ideas such as reflection and metamorphosis. She says she never wanted to capture “reality”, but to show the impossible, to make it possible in the lab.