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The Photobook Show

Photography and Painting: Examples of an Intricate Relationship

episode 17

Wed, Sept 25, 2024 at 1pm (ET)
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When photography came into being, painters feared that their trade would become obsolete; but this is not entirely what happened. Work for realistic painters definitely dropped off, but other painters felt freed from having to faithfully represent reality and so developed their art into abstraction and more. Over time, the relationship between photography and painting took on many different forms, and in this episode we’ll be looking not at photography books, but instead books with paintings that have a special relationship with photography. Join Stefan for an exploration of this intriguing relationship with books by James White, Gerhard Richter and Michael Schmidt, and Lucas Blalock.


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Stefan Frank

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.