The Photobook Show
Formalism is Everything
episode 20
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Jan Groover was not only an excellent photographer, but was also known to be a great teacher. To point out her interest in the formal aspects of her images, she famously told a student “Once you have the content, you don’t have to think about the content anymore, you have to think about the picture — once you’re in the woods, you don’t have to think about the trees anymore, you have to think about the picture!” Her carefully crafted prints are hard to reproduce in book form, but Stefan recently stumbled upon a catalog accompanying a large retrospective of her work in the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. We’ll take a look at this catalog, as well as books by Josef Albers and Bettina Rheims that give her work some context.
Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more (including presenting The Photobook Show) for StrudelmediaLive.
vierundsechzig.de/f64/
