The Photobook Show
Silence and Image
episode 3
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Let’s step out of our fast-paced lives for a brief moment and look at photobooks that deal with the topic of silence — which at first glance might seem counter-intuitive: how can you photograph sound, or even more, the absence of sound? In this episode we’ll look at examples of how photographers from both eastern and western traditions embody silence in their work:
- Yamamoto Masao’s Small Things in Silence
- Mariko Takeuchi’s collection of essays titled Silence and Image, which inspired the title of today’s show.
- Ulrich Wüst’s Stadtbilder, silent pictures of the vanished East Germany
- Work by Robert Adams — Sarah Meister (Aperture) recently edited a retrospective book with his pictures and gave it the very fitting title American Silence.
Watch the recording of this episode
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.