There are only a few squares left in my surroundings where the traces of different present worlds lie so raw next to each other, where they complement and intermingle, contradict each other and lead out into the open. Many squares are evenly concreted over, levelled, smoothed according to a DIN standard so that nobody trips and falls. On Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, on the other hand, the surface changes from old, crumbling asphalt to gravel to grass to paving slabs to cobblestones to sand and back again. In between, shards and stones roam, weeds, bushes, trees proliferate — as do past, present and future. Buildings are sparse, their function difficult to determine. For many decades, the square has eked out an existence as a wasteland with occasional use, despite being around six hectares in size and located right in Leipzig’s city centre. In the upheaval of the post-reunification period, an urban void like this represented a space of opportunity in which one could mentally alternate between new awakenings and depression. Leipzig was one of the shrinking cities in East Germany. By the end of the 1990s, the city had lost around ten per cent of its population due to emigration and falling birth rates. Since 2010, the trend has reversed. Today, the population has grown by twenty per cent and the city is increasing in density. Open space is becoming scarce. A large central wasteland such as Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz is unusual and, in a strange sort of way, attractive.

Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz is familiar to me. I grew up in Leipzig and have been living here again for a few years now. When I try to remember things I observed or experienced in my childhood connected with the square, I only find blurred images in my memory. They fit well with its present state. I often cross the square, but usually without perceiving it as a place in its own right. It is a transit space that I prefer to cycle rather than walk over, because it is quicker. At first glance, there is hardly anything to see or any reason to linger.

With their work Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz dedicated themselves for around twelve years to the conditions and layers of time in Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. In the cracks in the asphalt, the remnants of the architecture and the gatherings of people, they search for the specific features that characterise this place, its history, and also its potential. From 2012, around 1,500 analogue photographs were taken, in medium format and mostly in black and white. In the images, the square, in all its vastness, is scarcely visible; instead, in its many fragments and perpetual unfinished state, it appears like a backdrop whose many layers unfold in Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. The artists view the urban expanse like a stage, moving into its middle and observing nature, architecture and the legacies of various uses, mostly from close up. They follow the socio-political debates surrounding the design of the square and the attempts to occupy it with ideas and ideologies. They deal with the people who use the square in pursuit of their aspirations, pleasures and needs. By working as a duo, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz turn documentary observation into a productive dialogue that ultimately leads to a long-term conversation on how to position themselves in relation to the square and record it photographically.

With the first photographs in the book, we step onto Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz in the darkness of night. Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz set their flashes working in the night to create a focussed gaze. They expose what is being photographed, while the background sinks into black. Their observations remain mere hints, sometimes easier, sometimes more difficult to classify. In terms of motifs, the photographs are primarily characterised by nature, which takes its own space, and traces of human activity. Empty concrete flower boxes, trees that have long since been sawn down and charred branches, floor tiles in the midst of wild growth, parts of buildings sprayed with graffiti, a guard stone without the building it is supposed to protect, (1) a broken or collapsed entrance to a cellar vault. Among the dark imagery, the bright picture of a distillation apparatus lights up. The machine is as enigmatic as its presence somewhere in the square. Two figures piggyback through the darkness. The obscured view of the context of these photographic observations creates a vacuum. In another image, thick roots grow between evenly placed bricks, symbolically charged. At the top, this tangled growth has been sealed with asphalt and is laid bare here like a cut through time. Grass has long since grown over it. Such compressed anthropogenic deposits on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz extend to a depth of around six metres before the geological layers begin. (2)

Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz began their work Asphalt, Steine, Scherben in their late twenties while studying in Joachim Brohm’s photography and media class at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. At this age and at this point in their studies, many artists are trying out artistic languages, becoming more independent and developing their own artistic attitude. It is fitting that Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz chose to focus on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, an area that has been a wasteland for decades and is in a state of limbo in terms of urban design and urban development. An interest in urban space is something they share with Joachim Brohm. For his work Areal, he photographed the stratifications and changes in a commercial and industrial area in the north of Munich from 1992 to 2002. (3) Like Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, he returned several times to interrogate this place, which was similarly difficult to grasp. The Munich area is characterised less by emptiness than by an overabundance of things. It offers many visual anchor points, while Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz defies simple legibility, and its characteristic shape only unfolds under deep visual examination.

Biographically, in terms of Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz and the square they have photographed, it is worth taking a few steps further back to get a clearer picture of the background noise that accompanies Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. Dana Lorenz was born in East Berlin in 1984 and Sophia Kesting, like me, was born in Leipzig in 1983. We were born in the 1980s into a country that celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1989 and shortly afterwards ceased to exist. As young people in the post-reunification period, we witnessed the euphoria of new beginnings, hope and its disappointment, our rapidly changing everyday world and also a great sense of helplessness. Many opportunities suddenly stood before us and our families, and at the same time, somehow they didn’t. In their recently published book, Anett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler and Wenke Seemann “prefer to speak of East German experiences rather than of an East German identity, because the latter sounds so fixed again and no longer like a fluid, constantly changing construct imposed on us, which we conjure up, which we constantly reassemble from memories and imprints”. (4) Life in East Germany before and after 1990 was too varied to be summarised by ascribing it to a typical identity dominated by one state. Instead, it is worth exploring how we were shaped individually and observing how differently we remember our experiences, and how we build on them in future.

Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz open small time capsules with short texts placed between their pictures. With fragmentary memories, they evoke experiences, describe what has been seen, heard, smelled and felt, as well as what they do not know or do not remember. They try to capture in words how history is inscribed in the body, how we internalise the past and how we encounter the past in the present. The splinters of memory are inserted between the photographs like a subtext, accentuating their own imprint. In this way, these splinters selectively redirect our gaze from Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz as a public place to the individual experiences of two people, some of which can be described as spanning generations while others are hardly remembered in this way by anyone.

Like the scattered splinters of memory, the history of Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz has many loose ends. Some were picked up again later, others are buried or, in their rawness, difficult to read. The square was originally known as Königsplatz. From the end of the 19th century, during Leipzig’s transformation into an industrial and trade-fair city, it was given prestigious buildings, a market hall, a museum, a panorama, a cinema, hotels and department stores. In the mid-1920s, a substation was added to provide a steady supply of electricity to the city centre, which, in addition to the underground storage rooms of the market hall, also contributed to the undermining of the square and was in operation until the mid-1960s. No further expansion took place due to the heavy air raid on the night of 3–4 December 1943. The bombs damaged a large proportion of the buildings in the city centre. After the end of the Second World War, the largely destroyed Königsplatz and its immediate surroundings were given the name of the resistance fighter Wilhelm Leuschner, who had taken part in the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. The rubble from the buildings on this square, as well as that of the entire city, was removed by rubble trains until the mid-1950s. (5) Part of the wartime debris can still be found in the basement of the central market hall; fragmentary remains of the destroyed buildings symbolise the history of the 20th century turned to stone and have been photographed by Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz.

The clearing of the rubble in the post-war period was documented by Johannes Widmann, who was Professor of Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts from 1946. (6) He often photographed from within the very midst of the clod-like rubble. In his photographs, the remains of buildings and bent steel still stick out of the mountains of debris alongside the rubble railway tracks. The stacked bricks seem like a promise to the future that something new can grow again from this indeterminate place. Some of the owners at the time checked the structural stability of their damaged buildings and submitted applications for reconstruction but were rejected. (7) As a result, Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz was already a place in limbo during this period. When Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz began photographing the square around fifty years later, the limbo still existed, it had just taken on a different form.

After the demolition of the ruined buildings by the end of the 1950s, (8) the square took on its current appearance. It was now largely levelled and asphalted, with shrubs and trees beginning to encroach from the edges. The only additions were a pedestrian tunnel to the city centre in 1975 and the Bowlingtreff bowling alley in 1986/1987. Since the early 1990s, various stakeholders have been debating how best to revitalise the brownfield site with new development. (9) In 2011, the city council decided that a freedom and unity monument on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz should commemorate the peaceful revolution of 1989. Architectural firms drew up new development plans several times. Various competitions were held, but decisions were thrown out due to excessive resistance within the city council. In the meantime, the pedestrian tunnel had to make way for an underground commuter railway line. It was finally decided that a new market hall, educational and research centres, flats and a park landscape should be built. A second competition for the monument was launched in 2022 and the initial excavation of a construction pit at the south-east end of the square began recently. (10)

A large, empty and centrally located square is an ideal place for people to come together and express their interests, demands and desires in public. The events organised by the city, the initiatives of associations and the demonstrations that took place on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz paradigmatically reflect the history of the 20th and 21st centuries: The metropolitan flair that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with the new shopping and entertainment facilities on the square came to an abrupt end in 1938. The three local Jewish department stores were destroyed during the Kristallnacht pogrom. In 1954, still in the shadow of the war, the joint Protestant Church Congress of the FRG and GDR opened under the motto “Be joyful in hope”. In 1959, the Soviet Union’s foreign minister, Nikita Khrushchev, emphasised the new German-Soviet friendship at the opening of the spring trade fair. In 1965, around two thousand “beat friends” demonstrated against the ban on beat music in the GDR and were subjected to brutal attacks by the Volkspolizei. (11) The Monday demonstrations of 1989 marched past Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. Up until the early 2000s, hundreds of ravers partied largely unseen and undisturbed in the vaulted cellar of the former market hall, in the middle of the city and without public authorisation or attention. (12) In recent years, people have gathered for climate strikes or for resistance against the right. In between, Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz has served as a car park and a place for public festivals or simply to relax in or roam around. How do such events shape a square and what traces can still be found?

In the pictures of Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, past events are mirrored in the current use of the square. People can be seen standing, squatting, sitting and lying on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, looking remarkably indifferent as they do so. A certain sense of togetherness can be seen in the complementary relationship between the bodies. It is difficult to tell whether they are celebrating or demonstrating. There is enough space for both. The majority of the people photographed are of a similar age to the artists. They are representatives of a post-reunification generation that has to deal with its legacy and is in a position to shape the development of the urban society. In two photographs, a man looks questioningly at the sky, as if something unusual, perhaps even unsettling, can be seen there. We do not learn what it is, but in the background the New Town Hall and the City-Hochhaus skyscraper parenthetically locate the scene in the urban context of Leipzig’s city centre. In two other portraits, the subjects look directly into the camera and thus out of the book. Their questioning, determined, critical gazes address us as viewers as we leaf through the book. Uncertainty strikes us as we view a young woman standing in front of a weathered iron gate. With her gaze, she asks whether she should enter or not — and metaphorically, whether she can take possession of a place or not. An echo of this feeling of uncertainty can be found in an election poster without a motif. It hangs on a lamppost like a projection screen for various desires and slogans. This blank space waiting to be filled is further developed in the banners that Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz make visible from behind. Sections of other posters and flags can be seen that carry meaningful symbolism. The slogan “Refugees Welcome” stands for the anti-Legida movement, a cat represents anti-fascism and anarchy. We can only decipher either of them by analysing the fragments. At the same time, the symbols tell us which demonstrations the artists were present at. A German flag with a gold stripe torn out represents a more fundamental critique. Whether it coincides with the motivation with which the hammer, compass and spike wreath were cut out of GDR flags as representatives of socialism at the end of the 1980s, or whether it fundamentally questions the idea of the nation state, remains an open question.

In Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, the fragmentarily recorded postures and the lighting chosen echo the 1989 movement, when citizens marched around the inner ring road in the fight for free elections and a free country. In the late 1980s, the protests took place in the evening so that darkness could cover the demonstrators. Unlike Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, photographers before the Wall fell did not use a flash, in order to avoid being tracked down by the secret police. To capture the events in as much depth as possible, Evelyn Richter, then a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, managed to obtain highly sensitive films through her contacts in the West and handed them over to the students with the words: herself, but world history was happening right there and it needed to be captured.

In the centre of Asphalt, Steine, Scherben are three portraits of women that differ from the others in the way they are posed. All three worked in bowling alleys, one of them in fact in the Bowlingtreff on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. With these women, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz give the leisure centre, which closed in 1997, a contemporary face. The building has been an important protagonist and has an adventurous history. As a pioneering project, the planning of the Bowlingtreff broke the stagnation on the square and was a response to the increasingly negative mood among the city’s population. As one of the few East German representatives of postmodern architecture, the building was constructed in 1986/198714 and offered the opportunity to practise the American sport of bowling, play pool, use slot machines and a fitness room. Leipzig city council only reported the necessary financing and construction plans bit by bit to East Berlin. Construction began with the basement floors in the disused transformer station and was therefore largely invisible at first. When the budget was almost completely used up, the construction managers utilised so-called “local reserves”. For the Bowlingtreff, this meant that local residents volunteered countless hours of work to help complete the building. Appropriately enough, the bowling lanes were intended for use by the general public, as they were deliberately designed to be a little too short and therefore not suitable for competitions.15

When Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed the Bowlingtreff, it had already been closed for more than fifteen years. After various plans for its future use, the city council decided in 2020 that the Natural His-tory Museum should move into the building. In Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, the interim state of the building persists. The photographs highlight the postmodern architectural elements, capturing traces of its original use and later uninvited visitors, as well as its changes and decay. Here, too, the artists use flashes to illuminate what they have found. This changes the contours of the objects, making them appear artificial and creating unnatural shadows. The architecture takes on a somewhat spooky appearance. Black, dystopian-look-ing holes open up in windows and wall openings. White tiles make a clinical impression. Ventilation shafts, stacks of plates, supporting structures and the still look like abstract, artificial objects. The patina that has accumulated on the walls and fragments of furnishings over the years casts them in a particular light. The flash of a camera illuminates the dark rooms and brings out the foreground against the background, freezing movements in fractions of a second. In the case of the Bowlingtreff, these are the movements of decay, which progress slowly and almost imperceptibly.

With their visual language, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz draw on the photographic experiments of the late 1980s and thus transfer the atmosphere associated with them into the present. Maria Sewcz’s photographs are echoed in their cropping and condensation of what is observed. In 1987, she created a seismographic study of East Berlin with the group of works inter esse, in which she underscores the immediacy of her observations of urban life with a distinctive use of perspective and light. (16) The radical contrasts, ruptures and pictorial combinations of portraits, rank growth and urban fragments in Asphalt, Steine, Scher­ben also recall Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe, (17) who in like manner translated the leaden mood and fragility of West Berlin society before the fall of the Wall into photographs. In terms of motifs, a connection can be made with Erasmus Schröter’s Wartenden. Between 1980 and 1985, he photographed people waiting in Leipzig at night with an infrared camera and wrote in 2009: “As someone crossing the border between dream and reality, I moved through the dark nights of waiting.” (18) What are Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz waiting for in their photographic exploration? And what do we expect from a place like Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz?

When leafing through the stream of images of Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, one is struck by the many hands in the photographs. There are hands pointing or hands touching something, such as difficult-to-categorise stones. Some of the hands are holding bottles, candles, posters, flags or spotlights. These gestures are meaningful and are reminiscent of scientific or technical photographs, the purpose of which can hardly be fathomed by outsiders without explanation. Shifting such images into the context of art creates a particular tension, as the original argumentation leads nowhere. The complexity of the photographed activities and scientific equipment becomes evident, and the images are practically demanding to be filled with meaning. With their project Evidence (1975–1977), Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan were among the first artists to work with this tension. They recombined found photographs from science, politics and industry, thereby accentuating recurring gestures and typical pictorial elements. Unlike Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed their images themselves. When working together, the pointing hand was sometimes visible and mobile phones used for test photos would also enter the frame. The artists’ photographic tools are also present in Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. Initially, they had set up photo studio backgrounds in the square to pick out found objects or people from their surroundings. In the course of the project, they deliberately placed such evidence of their own working process in the picture, making their tools visible and thus underlining their role as visual researchers. The artists take portraits of each other as they prepare their shots or take photographs with their cameras, two medium-format Mamiya 7s. The cameras are granted a special appearance in the series of images. A Mamiya with an extra grip, on-camera flash and white shining bounce card stands on the edge of a wall. In one picture, a hand with a mobile phone protrudes into the frame, making the camera appear sculpturally solid and reassuring, but also a little dinosaur-like. The camera looks out of the picture towards us with its lens, reminding us of the act of recording and fixing a present that includes us.

“Photographs allow us to return to the past. They are a corrective, they sharpen our view of the past and of ourselves,” reads a display that was located on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz as part of the f/stop photography festival in Leipzig in 2018. The installation Das Jahr 1990 freilegen contained texts by Elske Rosenfeld, Christian Bochert and Jan Wenzel as well as photo-graphs by Andreas Rost that examined the year after the Wall fell and the role of photography as a means of documenting the events. For Asphalt, Steine, Scher­ben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed parts of the installation, thus adding to their reflections on their medium. The flash of the camera also assumes a special role here, as the reflection of the flash reveals the not entirely flat surfaces of the photographs papered onto the wall and thus also the limits of what can be seen in history’s pictorial space. Photographs are just as limited in their depth as they are at their edges. When we look at them, we can only see into them up to a certain point because the frame of the photographic images cuts the past into rectangles and filters the memory. Eventually, in the depths of the image details, the noise of the film material sets in, after which nothing more can be recognised. With Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz explore the past and its continued progression with contemporary photography instead of resorting to historical photographs. Researching a potential future with a medium so closely linked to a particular point in time can seem paradoxical, even more so on a site that has come to a virtual standstill.

In the interplay of the photographs, their counterparts on the double pages and in the dramatic structure of the series, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz’s observations and questions come together like a mosaic with its own logic. In the sequence of images, the artists have woven together references to different temporalities. Traces of the past are juxtaposed with the observed present to track a future that has already been laid out. They do not work their way through past events chronologically, nor do they sort their pictures according to the date they were taken, but instead bring their photographic observations into a dialogue with one another, creating friction and tension and thus dissolving temporal continuities. The artists pro-ceed in the same way with the geographical localisation of what they photograph. Spatial axes, what is above and below ground, inside and outside all become blurred as you leaf through the images. In some places, the pictures condense into themes such as protest or an interrogation of architecture. Other themes announce themselves with one or two images and are only fully developed later, or the reverse, where a single image picks up on something as if it were a later addendum. For example, early on in the book a candle with a windbreak alludes to demonstrations and towards the end a sombre nocturnal scene echoes the dark atmosphere of the intro. Like punctuation marks that provide structure, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz have regularly sprinkled fragments of the present between the thematic condensations: messages and comments left behind by passers-by, gatherings of people, temporary usages, signs of the nascent building site for the new development and the photographic equipment that bears witness to their own presence. The placement of these images might also be described as a recurring echo that creates it own space and reverberation.

A special motif emerged when Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz repeatedly pointed their cameras at the ground, as if photographically surveying the square. For once, the artists used colour film. In the pictures, the asphalt surface looks like a washed-over sandy beach in which small stones and shimmering shards have become stuck and where the water flowing back into the ground leaves traces in the form of indentations that are washed away by the next wave. The indentations are in fact scars of the events whose traces have been incorporated into the square over decades. They represent the remnants of the past that have not yet been built over and are still exposed for viewing. Before something new is created, we can pause with these photographs on the square and, with this knowledge of the past, speculate about the future ourselves.

1 The Bild newspaper speculates that it could be the last guard stone of the historic market hall:
https://www.bild.de/regional/leipzig/leipzig-news/leipzig-entdecktder-letzte-stein-der-altenmarkthalle-78964500.bild.html [last accessed on 30 May 2024]. The tiles are presumably floor tiles that were also originally in the market hall.

2 This was reported by Sebastian Lentz from the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography during a guided tour for the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst on 26 April 2024.

3 See Urs Stahel, Fotomuseum Winterthur (ed.): Joachim Brohm. Areal, Göttingen 2002.

4 Annett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler, Wenke Seemann: Drei ostdeutsche Frauen betrinken sich und gründen den idealen Staat, Berlin 2024, p. 95.

5 See Christoph Kaufmann: Mit Volldampf durch die Stadt. Die Leipziger Trümmerbahnen1944–1956, Leipzig 2006.

6 The photographs can be found in the estate of Johannes Widmann in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig: https://www.stadtmuseum.leipzig.de/ete?action=query&-desc=wilhelm+leuschner+platz+johannes+widmann&refine=Suchen [last accessed 30 May 2024].

7 Hella Gormsen: Vom lebendigen Geschäftsviertel über Kriegsbrache zum “Juwel”? Teil 2: Rund um die Markthalle, lecture on 4 June 2024 in the church of St. Trinitatis in Leipzig.

8 The demolition of the destroyed buildings continued until the end of the 1950s. The partially destroyed
market hall, for example, was not demolished until 1959 and was even still in use until then.

9 On the history of the square, see Brunhilde Rothbauer: “Esplanade. Königsplatz. Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. Zu Vergangenheit und Zukunft eines Leipziger Stadtraums”, in: Leipziger Blätter, H. 38, Leipzig 2001, pp. 52-55.

10 See Jens Rometsch: “Grün und Lebendig”, in: Leipziger Volkszeitung, 17 June 2024, p. 11.

11 See inter alia: https://www.leipzig.de/buergerservice-und-verwaltung/unsere-stadt/stadtgeschichte/historisches-aus-1000-jahren/beat-demoleuschnerplatz-am-31101965 [last accessed on 30 May 2024].

12 These raves are barely known to the public, an eyewitness report can be found on the internet: https://www.rave-strikesback.de/?page_id=925 [last accessed on 30 May 2024].

13 As reported by Matthias Hoch, who was one of these students, at the conference Long Time, No See. Fotografie in und aus Ostdeutschland hosted by the DGPh on 10 December 2022 at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin.

14 It was designed by Leipzig architect Winfried Sziegoleit, who was also previously involved in the Gewandhaus.

15 The history of the building is documented in the film Bowlingtreff (2015) by Adrian Dorschner and Thomas Beyer.

16 Inka Schube, Sprengel Museum Hannover (ed.): Maria Sewcz. inter esse, Göttingen 2013.

17 Michael Schmidt: Waffenruhe, Berlin 1987.

18 Kunsthalle Erfurt (ed.): Die andere Leipziger Schule. Fotografie in der DDR, Bielefeld 2009, p. 152.

During her research in the archive of the FOTOHOF, Sophia Kesting came across a slide collection that no one had considered worthy of attention for quite some time. The artist was invited to study the archive and to develop a new work in response to it. During a tour of the FOTOHOF with Kurt Kaindl - who is a founding member and still part of the team - she noticed numerous slide boxes. When asked, Kurt Kaindl told her about the use of the slides for his teaching, and thus opened up a view into the peripheral areas of the FOTOHOF archiv to Sophia Kesting. A closer look at these more or less forgotten slides led Sophia Kesting to initiate a fundamental and media-reflexive reflection on photography.

Since FOTOHOF was established in 1981, the team has offered courses on the medium of photography. The slide collection was used in Kurt Kaindl's photography courses in the 1980s and 1990s as illustrative material to explain technical and artistic functions of the medium. This collection includes about 5000 slides and several ring binders and came from various sources. Some came from photography companies, such as Lehrbehelf für Fotografie (Teaching Aids for Photography) which slides and explanations that could be ordered from Kodak in the 1980s as well as Nikon Fotoschule dated 1981. Kurt Kaindl had also reproduced many other images from magazines, newspapers and artist*s books, and added photographs from his own work.
Unlike photographs which are classified as works of art or that have a documentary character, such educational images undergo a special form of aging. As a result, they are usually not included in collection catalogs at all, or at least not at an equivalent level. At some point, they become obsolete because the cameras used have long since become outdated, or because the motif of the photograph or the medium of communication have become technically antiquated. As in the case of scientific images, the classification of being outdated usually leads to the educational images being disposed of or ending up in the far corners of archives, only to be forgotten. From this moment on, the originally intended gain in knowledge from the photographic images has disappeared. Nevertheless, they tell us something about the conditions of their production and the normative ideas associated with them, which incidentally find their way into the courses. This is precisely where Sophia Kesting's project Rewriting the Photographic Image comes in.

In Kurt Kaindl's teaching materials, Sophia Kesting was less interested in the technical information they provided. Instead, she focused her attention on how photographic knowledge is conveyed. In doing so, she made an observation that she encountered regularly in her work with the medium: in Kurt Kaindl's selection of images, as in other educational books until the 2000s, men actively shape the illustrations of image design and production, while women, by contrast, are often passive. In the meantime, this gender split has shifted, but the people being photographed and photographing are still generally white, binary, young, and good-looking.
In these found educational slides of the FOTOHOF, the gender-specific distribution is subject-related. In the chapters on portraiture, women's faces or naked female bodies are illuminated and modulated with brighteners. In the explanations of the photographic act and the development of photographs, men are the determining protagonists behind the camera, in the photo studio or in the darkroom. How can one deal artistically with such photographic material without becoming polemical? In what form is a media reflection possible that is critical and productive at the same time?

For Rewriting the Photographic Image, Sophia Kesting initially decides to unfold and handle the found material. She liberates the women's faces from the detailed technical descriptions and leaves only brief notes on the lighting as captions. No longer constrained within a dense textual framework, the faces seem less like pure surfaces. Instead, with the addition of white space, the subjective features of the women emerge. [pp. 13, 19] In another group of images, Sophia Kesting literally holds in her own hands the various shots of a woman's face from the Nikon photo school. This gesture effectively shifts our perception: it is not the photographed woman who appears as the object in the image, but the image itself, visible here as a print in material form. Sophia Kesting also emphasizes the act of viewing by holding the portraits in front of her camera in such a way that we can get a good look at them. And it is she herself who holds the images in her hand - as artist, photographer, viewer, and a presumably similarly-aged woman to the one illuminated here. [pp. 37–44]

As in many textbooks, the look behind the scenes is also an important part of Kurt Kaindl's teaching material in order to explain the process of image production. The necessary technical processes are divided into individual images for this purpose. Sophia Kesting takes up these visual explications with reenactments, replacing the men behind the camera, in the darkroom, in the photo studio, and in the studio with herself. As a female, she does not simply take the place of the men, she furthermore questions the common representations of photographic activity within the found material. To do so, Sophia Kesting first reenacts, with her own poses, the visual representation of the development of artistic production from Kodak's Lehrbehelf für Fotografie. [pp. 53–57] The original images reduce this development in drawn illustrations to a cave painter, a sculptor, a painter, and a photographer. For her reenactments, Sophia Kesting enters into an exchange with other artists*, positioning herself in front of their works or using their working tools for her representation of the various arts. In each case, she is seen in a rear view, thus also representative of many women who pursue an artistic activity. An exception and at the same time the final point of the series on the development of artistic production is a photograph taken with a camera. Here Sophia Kesting can be seen from the front and without an artistic product, but with a camera held in front of her face. In this way, we learn in passing with which format and how the artist takes her pictures. The Nikon F90X 35mm SLR camera she uses, a so-called handheld camera, allows for free, not necessarily static photography. The camera is analog and, in contrast to digital photography, speaks for an interest in fewer and therefore more concentrated shots, for a preference of analog image characteristics, and often for working with her own photographs in the darkroom.

With further images, Sophia Kesting further spells out the representation of photography. a pair of images depict both the actual act of taking pictures and the corresponding, completed motif, inviting us to draw comparisons between the two, as in a riddle picture. [pp. 58–59] A three-part group of images represents an important aspect of the shooting process: measuring the available light with an exposure meter. The light measurement is used to decide which parts of the image are to appear light and which dark, and thus which elements of the image are to be emphasized and which are recessed. The actual aim of such pictures - to explain how to hold the exposure meter correctly and what can be read from it - is impressively extended by Sophia Kesting. The exposure meter is held by a child's hand, an adult's hand, and an older hand. To be precise, these are her daughter, her mother and Sophia Kesting herself. The three of them certainly have different ideas with regard to creating images with light, already on the basis of their visual habits and body size alone. [pp. 63–65]

Other photographs of the project bring us into photographic workspaces. [pp. 67, 69] In a photo studio, Sophia Kesting positions herself in front of a camera obscura, and in the darkroom she handles photochemistry in a lab coat. The artist thus serves the genre of the professional portrait, in which mostly male protagonists take center stage in many professions, not only in photography. Such shots of people doing what is actually an invisible part of their work usually looks strangely artificial. The working person freezes for the moment of the picture, and yet something quite decisive is transported in these kinds of pictures: who determines the working process and what is the relationship to the working environment? Sophia Kesting's reenactments point out that it basically makes no difference whether women or men work in the laboratory, or to put it another way, women can and should control and represent the processes of image creation in the same way.

If one takes a step back when looking at Rewriting the Photographic Image and focuses attention not only on the fact that a woman is appropriating the photographic process here, other aspects that distinguish this work in its media reflexivity become evident. In dealing with the teaching archive, Sophia Kesting was preoccupied with the question of authorship, because the concept is complex in her project. On the one hand, because it is a work with found photographs that someone used to create teaching materials and that Kurt Kaindl selected for a class. Here we find a colorful mixture of unnamed image authors*, whom Kurt Kaindl had selected rather carelessly and reproduced for his lessons without particular regard to the original context. On the other hand, in the motifs where she herself appears as a person in the picture, the artist needs another person to take the photograph. Following the photographs found in the teaching archive, Sophia Kesting decisively determines the composition of the picture, but the additional authors* of the picture subtly introduce their own ideas into the planned setting. And last but not least, the three people with the exposure meter make it clear that the image authors* can be people with very different ideas.

In addition to the understanding of authorship, Sophia Kesting's project raises the question of the public visibility of archive material that does not fit into the category of artwork. In the holdings of the FOTOHOF archiv, there is one group of works so far – Musterbilder (sample pictures) by Hans Rustler – which can be understood as teaching material. These are test images that were created as part of a final project at the Agfa Photoschule Berlin. The pictures demonstrate the technical possibilities of making photographic prints and were published in 1931 in the sample folder of the Agfa Photoschule. In the context of Sophia Kesting's exhibition and publication, some of the images from Kurt Kaindl's slide collection will now be on public view for the first time. Sophia Kesting thus responds to the FOTOHOF's invitation – to question the collection with an artistic work and to set it in motion, – with an invitation to expand our view of the archive and to reconsider which image types and image authors* shape our view of photography.

Christin Müller's text appears in the artist's book "Rewriting the Photographic Image," Sophia Kesting, 2022, FOTOHOF edition: volume 348, ISBN 978-3-903334-48-9

Hi Dana, Hi Sophia, you are not IfZ residents, but artists and you are currently preparing the exhibition “Trakt IV” at the GfZK. What is the idea behind it and what does it have to do with the IfZ?

Dana & Sophia: Hello IfZ. Thank you for asking. We’ll try to keep it short.

Realizing a photographic project at the IfZ was quite a contradiction at first, but also a great challenge for us. Trakt I–III exist in the IfZ, so it was logical for us to call the exhibition in the Gallery of Contemporary Art “Trakt IV”. For us, the title symbolizes a new, artistic space and an imaginary extension of the rooms of the IfZ.

Adrian Dorschner, who planned and accompanied the renovation works at the IFZ more than 5 years ago in collaboration as an architect, asked us in spring 2017 if we could imagine realizing an artistic work at the IfZ, since the complexity of the place was difficult to depict in the form of conventional architectural photographs. We both appreciate the IfZ as a social space, feel at home musically and in the different communities that exist there, plus we can identify pretty well with the political positioning. But we were never part of the crew or anything.

We found it totally exciting that a historical place like the Kohlrabizirkus meets club culture. Unfortunately, in a city like Leipzig, which is currently changing so quickly, you can’t know how long socio-cultural spaces will last. Against this background, we found it all the more important to develop a photographic document of time, i.e. an archive over a longer period of time.

Since 2012, we have been working together on the long-term photographic project “Asphalt, Steine, Scherben” (Asphalt, Stones, Shards), with whose visual language we were able to partially sensitize the crew for a new, photographic project. Then it was still a long way for us through plenums, delis and individual conversations to the first picture. With each photo session, we all became more familiar and grew with the project, but were also challenged hard again and again.

“No-Photo Policy” and photo project, how does that fit together?

Dana & Sophia: First of all, not at all.

Nowadays, photos are generally treated far too lapidary, especially on the Internet. Photography can also have a strange form of power that can be very unpleasant. Taking photos in a protected space like the IfZ, despite a “no-photo policy”, is of course not something that can be done lightly and requires a particularly sensitive approach to each other. From the beginning, we could only imagine taking photographs in analog, on negative. In artistic photography, working in analog is indeed still and often again a legitimate choice. Shooting on film ensured that the photos could not be released uncontrolled onto the Internet for the time being. In addition to film development, we made contact prints (1:1 reproduction as positive) and deposited them in the office, so there was total transparency on our part about what we photographed and how. This was not always easy for us, since not every picture is at the same time a relevant and selected motif.

... and somehow we seem to have managed to reach a majority consensus, i.e. pro-photoproject within the crew...

What were the challenges, apart from the no photography rule, about photographing in the club?

Dana & Sophia: Definitely taking photos during the events. We don’t have that typical habitus that you might think of with party or fashion photographers. We rarely give people instructions and don’t like to shoot them with our power flash. We are simply there, invisible, and observe, i.e. document, what is happening. Therefore, despite our technical routine with the analog camera, the darkness in combination with the fast movements was a real challenge. Often we could not do without the flash, but then not to disturb in the club, but still to capture an authentic moment ...

Apart from that, working with so many different people, this big crew, the IfZ community in all its different facets was really impressive and honestly sometimes quite exhausting.

We dealt very closely with the right to the image of the individual and tried to protect it as much as possible. In addition, we obtained the signature for the publication of the images via a model release contract, or the possibility of censorship of the own image.

At this point we would like to get rid of something: We are totally excited about the exhibition and the response from the different sides. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported us, trusted us, worked with us, had their picture taken, or simply supported us without wanting to be photographed. This was a project where we saw, learned and experienced a lot. Many thanks from us for that!

Thank you Dana, thank you Sophia for the interview and especially for your work on Trakt IV!

The exhibition “Trakt IV” will be on display at GfZK Leipzig from 04-19-2019 to 04-27-2019. The opening is on 04-18-2019 at 6 pm.

Between around 1930 and 1950, in the still young city of Tel Aviv around four thousand buildings were erected along the guidelines of the Bauhaus and the International Style. Immigrants from Europe, most of all Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, brought the style with them. The urban planning of the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes left room for their implementation, so that Tel Aviv today still has the most buildings in this style. Around one thousand buildings of the White City have been part of UNESCO’s world cultural heritage since 2003.

In her project, Sophia Kesting goes in search of these buildings. She photographed them several times in Tel Aviv, but did not limit herself only to the buildings that have been declared landmarks, which only make up a small part of the city’s modernist architecture. Taking the one thousand landmarked buildings as an inspiration, she creates instead a different, subjective landmark catalogue of buildings, including contemporary ones as well, that take up elements of the International Style. The approximately one thousand photographs show buildings from various parts of the city, from the center and from neighborhoods on the city’s periphery that are today shaped by migrants from Africa, just as the White City was once shaped by migrants from Europe in the mid-twentieth century.

Each photograph focuses on a single building. Details from urban life like parking cars and passersby provide a subtle framing of the motif without dominating the foreground. The buildings appear as solitary, embedded more in social contexts than in an urban environment. Kesting thus shifts the gaze from the overall whole of urban planning to a large number of individual buildings that together make up the city. The gaze expands beyond UNESCO’s strictly regulated landmark bureaucracy to the constant change and development of the architectural legacy in Tel Aviv.

Each motif can be found in the exhibition as a poster on one of three piles. Visitors can take the top poster from each pile, thus over the course of the exhibition generating ever new motivic combinations, bringing the diversity of the buildings into the exhibition space. Over the course of time, Kesting’s White City disappears from the public space of the museum and becomes part of the private spaces of the exhibition visitors.

“Modernism. Iconography. Photography. The Bauhaus and its Effects 1919–2019.”
09-21-2019 until 02-09-2020
Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg

Sophia Kesting consistently works with her photographs and the forms of their elaboration against a pictorial ideal – that is, against those typical shots of ideals that we encounter so often when it comes to architecture or urban structures, to record and show (in an exhibition, a book, a booklet) in as undisturbed and positive a state as possible. Kesting’s project is something different, because with her work it becomes immediately clear that in a single room more forces come together than (conventional) architectural photographers (and their clients) could ever dream of. Each space is overwritten multiple times with information from its neighbourhoods and uses that are not provided for in the architects’ plan drawings.

The area of study for Kesting’s photographic research is the freight and central station of the capital of Tyrol, an area strongly characterised by the juxtaposition of different uses: garden allotments, often found in the immediate vicinity of railway lines, are replaced by fallow land and/or adjacent residential buildings. In the same way, local and global enterprises and companies have harnessed the geostrategic benefit of the place and settled here to ensure the smoothest possible transfer of goods and commodities. The different needs in this expanding area are therefore manifest, and it is feared that this coexistence of unequal forces will ultimately have to give way to a large-scale land-use plan to be able to continue the economic success story of Innsbruck in a global sense. The area is thus in a state of transition.

Sophia Kesting seizes the different user interests and puts them together. But it is also clear that from the outset, it is not possible to create a representation that provides a comprehensive overview of this area. Too many perspectives in the space overlap. The view is obscured – something always commands attention in the picture, which prevents an undisturbed reproduction of one of the many different architectural ensembles. The artist seizes this fact and visual impression and highlights it: she opts to completely abandon image hierarchies, instead merging the foreground and the background in extreme perspectives. Visually speaking, space between the different architectural structures is as minimal as a piece of the sky; as we know, Innsbruck is surrounded by mountains whose reproduction as a visual conclusion serves to integrate these scenes even more comprehensively.

The artist makes moments of extreme structural condensation utterly clear through her images. By collating her images (without white space) into a flyer and through the production of a record with the musician Andreas Trenkwalder, who has addressed this area and its sounds in his compositions, the artist succeeds in achieving this impression of a condensed experience without developing alternatives. In the exhibition, Sophia Kesting will not only present her work as a small-format flyer with the vinyl record, but will display excerpts from her work on the wall in the form of photo wallpaper. The huge ensemble of fragmented views of urban planning, accompanied by corresponding music, stands in stark contrast to the homogeneous urban structure that Innsbruck reveals at first sight. With Sophia Kesting’s (and Trenkwalder’s) work, however, it becomes evident that it pays to go off the beaten track when visiting a city that appears so smooth on its surface: These less popular areas are subject to transformational processes due to political and economic interests. 

The text by Maren Lübbke-Tidow is published on the occasion of the exhibition catalog: “Right there”, Kunstraum FO.KU.S, BTV Stadtforum Innsbruck, 10-02-2018 until 01-04-2019