Finalist 2025, Dörte Eißfeldt

Biography

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 photons, chemistry, and paper through analogue and hybrid processes, confronting traditional techniques—solarisation, montage, multiple exposures—with new digital technics. 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.

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 multiple prints, varying the light, scale, and tonality, leading the viewer from a cosmic spectacle—a sphere tumbling in darkness—toward a more intimate experience. In the series Haut/Skin (1991), she plays with 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. 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 synthetic skies.

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 revisiting her archive through a process of recreation of her work.

https://www.doerte-eissfeldt.de/

Portfolio