The Photobook as Object: Structure, Concept, Experience
In this 90-minute Mini-workshop you’ll approach the photobook as a site of experimentation — where form is not a container but an active agent in producing meaning. Stimulate your thinking about the possibilities of the photobook as Maryna Shtanko presents a series of projects drawn from her own body of work that challenge conventional book structures through fragmentation, binding, and material choices.
Maryna will focus on how specific formal decisions emerge from — and transform — the concept. Selected contemporary photobooks will serve as points of comparison, highlighting diverse strategies of working with the book as an object. The workshop is intended for those seeking to move beyond standard formats and to develop a more deliberate, materially driven approach to photobook-making.
Maryna Shtanko is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with photography. She has Master’s degrees in both German language and literature and in communication design and photography. Growing up in Ukraine and relocating to Germany following the Russian full-scale invasion has deeply influenced her engagement with questions of place and collective trauma. By combining analogue photographic processes with textiles, video performances, and book-making, Maryna creates works that resist fixity, emphasizing vulnerability, resilience, and the porous boundary between image, matter, and lived experience. Maryna has been awarded several grants and scholarships, and her work has been exhibited in Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Switzerland, and Slovenia.
Maryna teaches the photobook as object for StrudelmediaLive.