HAUS FÜR POESIE

Dieter Gräf (born 1960 in Ludwigshafen) has described his approach to photography as one marked by an “amateur attitude.” For him, photography is not a medium for artistic self-indulgence. Rather, it developed a pull that surprised him and led him to distrust the boundaries between individual disciplines. As Gräf writes: “Now I am no longer a real poet, nor a real artist.” Since 2014, he has exhibited his photographs in cities including Stuttgart, Berlin, and Beijing. In his books, photographs have assumed an increasingly important role in dialogue with the text. Critic Michael Braun has described his work as a “photographic ethnography of everyday life” in the tradition of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: a kind of meditative poetry with almost no words, offering silent lessons in transience.

Paul Hutchinson (born 1987 in Berlin) studied photographic art at Central Saint Martins School of Arts and Design in London. For him, photography is closely connected to an intensified awareness of “being in the world,” guided by an inner curiosity toward things and situations. Writing came later, not least because he felt that neither his own life nor the culture he comes from was represented in contemporary literature. In both his writing and photographic work, he engages with urban life, social mobility, and social inequality. Again and again, his work explores the relationship between the city, nature, and poetry. According to Hutchinson, what unites his texts and photographs is a “bittersweet form of articulation.”

Poet Björn Kuhligk (born 1975 in Berlin) first emerged publicly as a photographer with the series Schöne Orte (2019). Armed with a smartphone, he wandered through the German capital documenting unusual locations that were at once beautiful and bleak: bowling alleys, backyards, and the rear facades of buildings. As critic Barbara Weitzel observed, his images capture “the defiance of the empty bus stop, the loneliness of garbage bins,” revealing “all too human qualities without any humans.” In the early 2020s, Kuhligk went on to study at the Ostkreuz School of Photography. He continued the serial approach of Schöne Orte, including projects in Eislingen. In an interview, he described his work as combining precision with a sense of being “on the move” within the material and “toward the material.” Summing up the difference between literature and photography in his own practice, he said: “As a photographer, I work conceptually; as a writer, I surrender myself.”

In the work of poet Sabine Scho (born 1970 in Ochtrup), the interplay of word and image has become increasingly important over time. Most recently, this was evident in the literary-artistic project The Origin of Values 0 – Pantanal, commissioned by Villa Aurora/Thomas Mann House. Another example is Farbfolge, a flag installation presented in 2022 at the Spreeblitz roller coaster. Together with Matthias Holtmann, Scho observed the transformations taking place in Berlin’s Spreepark and translated the documented network of relationships between humans and nature into various artistic formats, including inverted colour photographs. The result was a “ruderal flag installation in amusement-park colours,” accompanied by a lecture performance. In a modified form, the installation was relocated the following year to the teacup ride in Spreepark. Here, too, a text was created and presented as part of a staged reading.

In Reading & Conversation Dieter M. Gräf, Paul Hutchinson, Björn Kuhligk, Sabine Scho
Moderation Tobias Lehmkuhl