Friederike von Rauch & Charlott Markus Talk at the Academy, Antwerp

Friederike von Rauch
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Friederike von Rauch is a German artist based in Berlin, who is a member of the POC (Piece of Cake) Collective, together with Charles Freger, Bert Danckaert, Charlott Markus and a number of other artists. She came into the Academy, together with Charlott Markus, to talk about her work and the progress of her career up until now.

As a photographer, she has established herself with great success- she's represented by two galleries, one in Antwerp and one in Berlin, and has published two books.

Her work is about documenting places formally; that is to say, she is not interested in their geographical location, but in the aesthetic of the resulting image. Her work has become more and more abstract; she believes it is not necessary to show reality in photography, even if you are dealing with it through the lens.

Her work method is very slow; she never features people in her photographs, and prefers overcast weather due to the absence of shadows. As a consequence, her photographs are the result of careful timing and reasoning, considered meticulously before being taken. Her shooting time ranges from anything between an hour and a day; she uses a roleiflex camera, and up until recently has completely worked with analog processing. She still only shoots analog, but has recently started printing digitally.

Before dedicating her career entirely to photography, she worked as a location scout for film productions, including the Bourne Supremacy. She studied industrial design, although she focused heavily on photography in her work.


Charlott Markus
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Charlott Markus is a Swedish photographer recently graduated from the Gerritt Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. She creates scenes with found objects, and arranges them in a way that questions the play between order and chaos.

She prefers to work with harsh light because of the interference of shadows; like Friederike von Rauch, she is interested in the formal composition of an image. However, her work completely differs from von Rauch's; her colours are vivid and play an important role in the investigation of form and composition.

There are obvious references to painting, and as was pointed out in the discussion, Markus seems to draw more inspiration from painting than from photography. She believes that everything in her images have to be of equal matter and importance.

In her piece Pygmalion, she references Greek mythology and Bernard Shaw. She questions the state of being in between, her work being a comment of dissonance.

In another piece, Why Confess When You can Perform, she looks at religious institutions and the importance of the organization of a place of worship. She wanted to create an installation that would aid a visual revelation if seen from a specific (photographic) perspective- where distance and relativity becomes lost in form and color. Why Confess is an example of her installation work; she has increasingly shown more installations, but plans to focus on photography in the future.

She believes that you 'can't control the interpretation, but you can control the view' from which the audience perceives the piece.