Dortje Fink

photo by Detlef Eden

Dortje Fink is an art and photography historian, educator, cultural organizer and podcaster based in Berlin. With academic training at Humboldt University in Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, her research interests involve photographic archives, exhibition histories, lens-based media art, visual culture, biases of canonization, and decentering the history of photography. Her deep engagement with works of Carrie Mae Weems, Philip Kwame Apagya, Boris Mikhailov, Martin Chambi, Nickolas Muray, and Manfred Paul has inspired her writing, which has been published in exhibition catalogues and magazines. Since 2014, she has been working with C/O Berlin — an exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual media. She hosts, along with Julia Wolf, the German podcast "rein theoretisch – Fotografisches mit Fink&Wolf" about photographs whose visibility is restricted for a variety of reasons.

Dortje’s Classes

Dortje is an excellent lecturer and was thoroughly prepared for each session. This class with her was interesting, and learning about the history of photo exhibitions of merit was rewarding. Dortje gave us the challenge of preparing a short lecture, which was a stimulating exercise since it had us transfer classroom information into real life experience. My understanding of the history of photography has been greatly expanded by having had two classes with Dortje.
—Lenore (San Francisco)