Was machen eigentlich: Wenzel Stählin und Anja Engelke

In unserer Rubrik „Was macht eigentlich…?“ erzählen Hochschulangehörige von und über ihre Arbeit.

You've been running the HfK Bremen's photo workshop since spring 2023. What did you find when you started and what did you change?

Anja: Everything was well set up and organised here with processes that work. Only the darkroom was little used, so we revived it and offered analogue photography courses again. 

Analogue photography, why should you do it again today?

Anja: It's a different style, a different feeling. I know that pressing the shutter button once costs so and so much money, and then I have a much more focussed approach than if I think I can take 1,000 pictures digitally and it won't cost me anything. 

Wenzel: When you work with large-format cameras, you achieve a resolution in analogue that you can't achieve with normal digital cameras. This incredibly high quality of analogue photography is still valid in art, even if it no longer plays a commercial role. 

You have also expanded the range of services offered by the photo workshop ...

Wenzel: ... and initiated a new series: Lab Talks. As we are both artists, we wanted to invite colleagues who stand for their very own work processes to join us in the workshop and talk about them. In art, we often talk about the why, about concepts and ideas, not so much about expertise. Our series aims to change that. 

What else does the photo workshop offer?

Anja: In addition to the darkroom, we have a really well-equipped professional photo studio as well as workstations for scanning and digital image processing with Adobe Cloud programmes.

Wenzel: We also print a lot, from small photos to large posters, 1.10 metres wide and as long as the roll of paper is. People from all over the HfK use it. We do the work on the photo printer ourselves. Anyone can come to the photo studio after an introductory course and work independently. 

So the complete photography process is mapped for you. 

Wenzel: We guarantee a very good workflow. You can expose a film in our studio in the morning, then you go into the darkroom and develop it, then you go up to the digital room and scan it in and then we print it out. 

Are you the photographers in the studio?

Anja: No, that’s not how we understand our work. We provide guidance and offer help for self-help. Only when we realise that what students are doing could be done in a better way, we do start explaining. It’s an opportunity to try things out on your own - we are just there to provide advise. 

And if one doesn‘t have a camera?

Anja: We also have a camera hire service, so if you don't have any equipment, you can get it from us.

How do students learn how to use the medium of photography?

Anja: We offer introductory courses on fixed dates, which we communicate and you can simply register for them. However, these are often fully booked as soon as we advertise them. That's why there is a second option: students look for a group themselves, approach us and then we find a course date together.

Does this also apply to music students?

Anja: Musicians still rarely come to us, but that's about to change. To work in the studio, you need an introduction. Musicians usually didn’t get one yet. Of course they need good pictures of themselves and so it’s our aim to offer basic workshops and combine that with small photo shoots in the studio. So that you can go home with a knowledge of studio photography, but also with a good photo, which can then be used to promote concerts. 

And if you haven't completed the courses and still want to take photos?

Anja: Events here at the HfK are so interdisciplinary that students network with each other, so even photo amateurs meet fellow students who can take photos - and get to know each other and contact each other if necessary.

Do you have a division of labour? 

Wenzel: We are both here part-time, so there are three days when only one of us is here, so that everyone has to be able to do all the tasks. And each of us also holds introductory courses.

Where did you actually come to the HfK Bremen from?

Anja: I grew up in Bremen-Woltmershausen. I studied integrated design here from 2003 to 2008 and then worked as an artist, which also requires money, so I took online shop photos for e-commerce companies and taught at the Wandsbek Art School and the Bauhaus University Weimar. 

Wenzel: I was born in Stuttgart. So I combine the most beautiful German dialects: Swabian and Saxon - now I'm in Bremen and can get rid of them again. 

Saxon?

Wenzel: I lived in Leipzig, studied photography there with Heidi Specker, then worked as a freelance artist and also did a lot of photography as a bread-and-butter job, for museums, galleries and architecture. All that kind of stuff ... 

... Fashion, food, weddings?

Wenzel: I would have done the same if orders had come in. In Bremen, I can now keep my work divided into two parts, have half a job in the photo workshop to pass on my photographic knowledge - and continue to use the other time for my artistic work. 

What fascinates you about photography?

Wenzel: The great thing is the super direct access to the world, I can go out and do anything with my camera in any situation. And then you can continue working with the image in the studio and then wallpaper it on a wall, make a nice print in the darkroom, print it on fabric, project it ... endless possibilities. For me, the artistic process always starts with a picture, if it tells me something, if I discover an observation of social relevance, I research it further, read a lot and continue to photograph from the initial impulse in order to make something new out of it. I travel somewhere or recreate scenes in the studio, which results in a work, such as a photo series, that is more conceptual.

It's not about reflecting reality, but about your interpretation?

Wenzel: Exactly. For example in my series "Growing". The starting point was very personal: my father was dying, a brain tumour was growing in his head, and at the same time a child was growing in my wife's belly. Death and life. Then we went for a walk in the botanical garden in Tübingen, where my father was hospitalised, in winter, the garden was asleep in the cold outside, the plants were growing in the greenhouses inside. I photographed it all, rather documentarily, and the pictures with the different aspects of growth kept me busy and made me think about economic growth and the end of limitless growth due to our limited resources. And then came to physical growth, bodybuilding and fitness, getting the body to grow through muscle building for self-optimisation in the workplace ...

... to keep the gross national product growing ... 

Wenzel: ... Exactly. In the end, I went to a fitness fair in Cologne and realised that many of the stands were decorated with flowers. Which reminded me of still lifes, where flowers have this memento mori symbolism, remember your mortality - and then you see these incredibly trained bodies behind them, this striving for physical perfection, for immortality. That's how the still life series "Growing" came about - with bodies and flowers. 

And how do you use the medium artistically?

Anja: It started here at the HfK with a photo project that I did to distract myself from my degree. I chose well-known and important positions in the history of photography, baked them as cakes, photographed them and then ate some of them to internalise them. In 2018/19, I lived in a photograph and recreated the work "Room 125" by American artist Stephen Shore from 1973 in my flat: a hotel room. I moved into the picture and took the photos there that Shore didn't take. I am currently exploring the history of photography by scrutinising it anew with AI. 

Why did you return to the HfK?

Anja: I was always in contact with my predecessor Matthias Schneege, who always talked so positively about this position that I thought, if Matthias leaves, I want the job. So I spent years preparing for the application and it worked out. I was very pleased that many people recognised me in the XI warehouse when I returned, it was like finding my way back into a family. A statue of a saint that I left behind in the digital room as a student is still there. So I was never really gone ...

And what interested you, Wenzel, about the HfK?

Wenzel: I have a personal story to tell. My grandfather Jobst von Harsdorf was a professor of publishing graphics here from 1961 to 1989. He told me great things about the university, just like my brother, Anselm Stählin, who studied Integrated Design here until 2015 and worked with Karl Strecker in the wood workshop, as he had already completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter. My brother also sent me the job offer for the HfK photo workshop and said, why don't you apply? It was a good fit, because my wife, my two children and I wanted to leave Leipzig and move to the countryside, but as my brother and my mum also live in Bremen, I thought it might be a good idea to move in with my family - and it's a good idea.

What does the photography programme at the HfK Bremen stand for?

Wenzel: For me, this is always linked to Peter Bialobrzeski, i.e. the tradition of documentary photography, which is now being continued with Andrea Diefenbach. The special thing about the HfK is the integration of photography into integrated design and fine art, so that very different approaches can be taught.

Anja: For me, the photographic aesthetic here is also linked to Peter Bialobrzeski, after all I studied with him, although I started with illustration and only took my first photography course in the 4th semester. 

When you look back at the work of students from the last twelve months, are there any trends at the HfK?

Wenzel: Dealing with one's own biography and identity issues are very present at the moment, origin is important, gender identities and role models.

And what is aesthetically pleasing?

Wenzel: The basis is a documentary search, but it often goes further, there are always people who combine classic photography with other techniques, make collages with documentary photos, combine them with found objects or restage them in installations.

Are you reinforcing one trend or another?

Wenzel: I was always told during my studies: you are all artists. That gives you such freedom. That you can do anything you want. So I can break all the rules that exist in photography if I want to and it's not just arbitrary. 

It has to make sense!

Wenzel: That's why I don't interfere with the image processing. The students have to develop their ideas - by whatever means.

In this day and age, anyone can create any image with AI and editing programmes without ever having taken a photograph. What justification does photography still have?

Anja: AI will lead to entire areas of work for photographers disappearing, such as product photography. But AI will also lead to a return to analogue techniques. And the more we are inundated with fake news etc., the more important documentary photography will become. Photography will not lose importance in art either, just as painting did not lose importance with the invention of photography, but rather gained freedom ...

... Painting became expressionist, then more abstract, more conceptual ... and photography is now becoming more concrete again and working on a contemporary idea of realism?

Wenzel: Photography has lost its claim to truth, because soon it will no longer be possible to verify whether an image depicts reality or was created on a computer. Photography, on the other hand, will become sharper again in terms of what it is. When everything can be an image and everything can look like a photograph, then we can think back to what photography used to be, how we create an image. Observing closely, looking for the light, capturing the right moment, etc. In other words, depicting what really happened.

In the age of photo overkill on Instagram and the like - is it still possible to recognise the boundary when a photo becomes a work of art?

Anja: When it hangs in a museum, a photo is a work of art.

Wenzel: If I only share my photos on Insta or do something with fashion in the applied field, then it's not art at first, which doesn't mean that it can't be artistic, it just doesn't take place in a sphere that can be evaluated in an artistic context. I find this separation superfluous, but it is taken very seriously, especially in Germany. Many photographers therefore have two websites, one for their artistic work and one for their applied work. 

That's schizophrenic.

Anja: That's how the market works.

Thank you very much for the interview.