Photography

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) is one of the most influential artists and provocateurs of our time. He is celebrated for blending Chinese history and tradition with artistic expression and political activism, all within a wholly contemporary practice. Beyond traditional mediums, his artistic work extends to architecture, documentary filmmaking, and large-scale public installations, each serving as a form of human rights activism, cultural commentary, and critiques of the global imbalance of power.&nbsp;Born into exile due to his father’s political persecution, Ai Weiwei's early life was marked by hardship, shaping his lifelong commitment to questioning authority. This commitment has often made him a political target in the past. He studied at the Beijing Film Academy before moving to New York in the 1980s, where he was influenced by conceptual art and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Returning to China in the 1990s, Ai Weiwei emerged as a key figure in contemporary Chinese art while also co-founding independent art spaces and experimenting with radical forms of artistic expression. After years of surveillance and restrictions, he was eventually allowed to leave China in 2015 and has since lived in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Portugal.&nbsp;Ai Weiwei gained international recognition through powerful works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Sunflower Seeds (2010), Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (Gold) (2015), Illumination (2019), and Straight (2008–2012), a poignant memorial to the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai Weiwei’s works are held in major museums worldwide and have been exhibited in leading institutions such as Tate Modern, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Venice Biennale. His relentless pursuit of truth and justice, coupled with his innovative artistic vision, continues to inspire global audiences and redefine the role of art in society. As Ai Weiwei himself asserts, “Everything is art. Everything is politics.”

Ai Weiwei

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is famous for conceptual artworks that challenge authority and explore the links between the contemporary world and traditional Chinese culture.

Wo ist die Revolution?

The Bechers captured what they called the “anonymous sculpture” of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, and framework houses in striking black-and-white compositions, which they almost always arranged in gridlike series they referred to as “typologies.” These typologies act as catalogs of industrial design, historic documents of obsolete technologies, and expansions on the possibilities of landscape photography. The Bechers have been the subject of exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art. They won the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award, and their work has sold for six figures on the secondary market.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their austere, elegiac, and widely influential photographs of industrial architecture in their native Germany.

Trier-Ehrang, D, 1982/2009

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark) is an internationally renowned Icelandic-Danish artist whose expansive practice merges art, science, ecology, and perception. Known for immersive installations that engage the senses and prompt collective experience, Eliasson explores the intersections of nature, technology, and human consciousness.Through light, colour, water, mirrors, and atmospheric effects, Eliasson constructs environments that transform the viewer’s awareness of space and self. His seminal installation The Weather Project (2003), which filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with a glowing artificial sun, invited nearly two million visitors to bathe in light and mist, offering a shared moment of sensory awe.Eliasson’s socially engaged projects—including Little Sun, a solar lamp initiative, and Ice Watch, a climate action installation featuring melting glacial ice—reflect his belief in art as a tool for change. His Berlin-based studio, Studio Olafur Eliasson, operates as an interdisciplinary laboratory where architects, scientists, and craftspeople collaborate across fields.Committed to sustainability and collective awareness, Eliasson’s work blends aesthetic wonder with ethical inquiry. His art is held in major public collections, and he has exhibited at institutions such as MoMA, the Venice Biennale, and the Fondation Beyeler.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson uses technical devices and natural elements such as light, water, and fog to transform exhibition spaces into immersive, site-specific environments.

Contact is Content at Seljalandsfoss

Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is known for his silent, almost meditative large-format landscapes. Although a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes to pursue the exploraiton of nature.

German photographer Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is usually associated with silent, almost meditative landscapes in large formats and with earthy colors. Esser was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf, the same school where talents such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth were formed. While clearly influenced by their teachings, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes and the rigorous style connected with them. Esser’s semi-romantic landscapes are unmanipulated and usually work with a very low horizon line in a simple, almost empty composition. Nature becomes a totality, indefinite and mysterious, but yet also calming and steady. Sky and water blur into each other to a point of complete disappearance, where everything seems to be mirrored by the same vast emptiness of the sky. As one of the most prominent photographic artists in Germany, Esser's works can be found in the collections of top museums and galleries in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam.

Elger Esser

Elger Esser’s pale, luminous landscape photographs, which are almost entirely unpeopled and frequently feature a straight, low horizon line, have been compared to both early-19th-century photography and Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century.

Nocturnes à Giverny

Robert Longo (b. 1953, Brooklyn, NY) is a leading American artist known for his monumental, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings that grapple with power, perception, and the emotional weight of images. Working across drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and film, Longo explores the visual language of mass media and the symbolic construction of authority, violence, and beauty in contemporary culture.Longo rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, alongside peers such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. His early Men in the Cities series (1981) became iconic for their stark, cinematic portrayal of sharply dressed figures in mid-motion, signaling his deep engagement with gesture, drama, and media aesthetics.Inspired by events like the Kent State shootings, political unrest, and image saturation in contemporary life, Longo draws from newspapers, film stills, X-rays, and historical artworks to build compelling visual narratives. His subjects range from riot police and migrants to nebulae, shark attacks, and roses in bloom—what he calls “absolutes.” He reinterprets canonical works by artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh, and the Abstract Expressionists, and his Forensic Distance and Gang of Cosmos series reflect on the weight of art history in the present moment.Longo’s mastery of charcoal enables him to slow down the image, transforming fleeting media snapshots into meditative, visceral encounters. His recent bodies of work, including The Destroyer Cycle and A History of the Present, reflect on sociopolitical crises, climate change, and freedom of expression, challenging viewers to confront the world through a heightened visual consciousness.Longo lives and works in New York. His work is held in major international collections, and recent solo exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum (2024–25) and a traveling retrospective at the Albertina Museum, Vienna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2025).

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.

Eric, NYC, 1980

Hell's Gate

Thomas Struth (b. 1954, Geldern, Germany) is one of the leading figures in contemporary photography, known for his large-scale, detail-rich images that explore the structures of public and private life. A student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Struth began his career photographing the empty streets of Düsseldorf, later expanding his lens to family portraits, museum visitors, and cutting-edge technological sites.Struth’s work probes the social fabric of modern life through a precise, objective style. His iconic Museum Photographs series, which documents visitors engaging with iconic artworks in cultural institutions, captures moments of collective attention and historical dialogue. In later series such as Paradise and Nature &amp; Politics, he investigates both untouched landscapes and the hidden infrastructures of science and industry, revealing how progress, power, and perception are constructed.Blending conceptual rigour with human sensitivity, Struth’s photographs illuminate how we navigate space, memory, and meaning in a visually saturated world. His work is held in major international collections and has been widely exhibited, including retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth’s mesmerizing, large-format photographs capture the wonders of nature, machinery, architecture, and contemporary life itself.

Museo del Prado

Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde, Germany) is internationally acclaimed for her large-scale color photographs of architectural interiors that explore the cultural and psychological dimensions of public space. A prominent member of the Düsseldorf School, Höfer studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1982, where she was mentored by influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher—alongside peers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff.Höfer is best known for her rigorously composed images of libraries, museums, concert halls, palaces, and other institutional interiors. Often devoid of people, her photographs prompt viewers to reflect on the function of these spaces and the presence of their absent users. As she notes, “What people do in these spaces—and what these spaces do to them—is clearer when no one is present.” Her work investigates how architecture shapes experience, conveying both grandeur and intimacy through subtle light, symmetry, and structure.Since the 1980s, Höfer’s work has been widely exhibited in Europe, North America, and beyond. She has had solo exhibitions at the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, Museum Folkwang, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Museo Amparo, among others. Her work has been featured in major group exhibitions including Documenta XI, MoMA New York, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In 2003, she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale.Höfer has received numerous accolades, including the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography (2018) and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Academy of Arts, Berlin (2024). Her photographs are held in leading international collections and continue to shape conversations around the role of architecture, memory, and cultural identity.Candida Höfer lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Candida Höfer

In majestic large-format color photography, Candida Höfer captures the psychological residue left behind in empty public and institutional spaces.

Teatro Degollado Guadalajara III

JR (b. 1983, Paris, France) is a French artist known for his large-scale photographic installations that blend public art, social activism, and storytelling. Working at the intersection of photography, street art, filmmaking, and community engagement, JR transforms urban and rural landscapes around the world into powerful platforms for collective expression.Maintaining a degree of anonymity, JR began his career as a street artist, posting black-and-white portraits in public spaces to confront social and cultural divides. His early project Face 2 Face (2007) placed portraits of Israelis and Palestinians side by side along the separation wall, challenging viewers to question identity and difference. In Women Are Heroes (2008–11), JR highlighted the strength and dignity of women living in conflict zones by pasting their faces across buildings, bridges, and trains.In 2011, JR received the prestigious TED Prize, which enabled the launch of the ongoing Inside Out Project—a global participatory art initiative that allows individuals and communities to share their own stories through large-scale portraiture. Since then, JR has orchestrated striking interventions worldwide: in a Brazilian favela, on the US-Mexico border, in the Louvre courtyard, and across the Sahara Desert.JR has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Saatchi Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Munich, and the Venice Biennale. His first solo exhibition in the Nordic region, Déplacé.e.s, opened at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm in 2024.He is also an accomplished filmmaker, directing four feature-length documentaries including Women Are Heroes (2011), the Oscar-nominated Faces and Places (2017, with Agnès Varda), Paper &amp; Glue (2021), and Tehachapi (2023).JR continues to challenge the boundaries of art and activism, using creativity as a tool for empathy, visibility, and social change.

JR’s practice lies at the intersection of photography, street art, film, and social practice.

Trompe l'oeil, Death Valley, Billboard, March 4, 2017, 5:41 pm, California, USA

He began his career as a painter before taking up photography in 1971. Upon moving to Paris in 1978, Lindbergh started working for Vogue, which eventually led to assignments for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. He shoots portraits of celebrities and supermodels for these publications and has also worked on sumptuous advertising campaigns for such top fashion houses as Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, and Comme des Garçons. Although Lindbergh works in both color and black and white, the latter is his preferred medium.

Peter Lindbergh

The fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh is celebrated for his artfully composed narrative photographs, as well as his films and television commercials.

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