The La Brea Matrix I

Jens Liebchen

Jens Liebchen (Bonn, Germany b. 1970) is a photographer based in Berlin. His artistic work has a documentary approach and is conceptually oriented. In his photographs, he addresses political and social topics and utilizes a wide range of visual languages from black and white to color photography. Furthermore, he is doing commissioned work for cultural institutions, companies and agencies in the field of corporate, documentation, people and architecture photography.

 

His photographs have been published and exhibited internationally and he is represented by Gallery Springer Berlin. His commissioned work is published in magazines and corporate publications. Jens is an appointed member of the German Photographic Association and a member of Freelens.

 

Max Regenberg

Max Regenberg (Bremerhaven, Germany b. 1951)  has been conducting a long-term photographic study of billboards in public spaces since the late 1970s. After finishing his training as an advertising photographer in Germnay in 1977, he worked in Canada for three years. While in Canada, he was influenced by the emerging New Topographics America by the mid-1970s was already the Eldorado of oversized billboards.

 

Advertising myths meet the urban landscape, resulting in a tension between two visual systems. The re-photographed billboard images enter into a new context and thus draw attention to the fact that public space and everyday life are continually economized through the aesthetic impact of the visual codes of advertising. Regenberg's work has been widely exhibited in museums and institutions throughout Germany since 2000.

 

Oliver Sieber

Oliver Sieber’s (Düsseldorf, Germany  b. 1966) work usually takes the form of series. He is fascinated by the subject of identity and the phenomenon of young people and their subcultures. This led to the series SkinsModsTedsl; B-Boyz B-Girlz; 11Girlfriends and Boy Meets Girl. In 2006, Sieber spent time in Japan for an artist in residence program, where he made the series J_Subs as well as Character Thieves, for which he photographed young people dressed up as their favorite manga characters. Over the past few years, exhibitions of his work have been held at, among others, the Photographers Gallery London; the Photohraphische Sammlung SK/Stiftung Kultur in Cologne; the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen; the Photo Espana Festival in Madrid; Yours Gallery in Krakow and Fotomuseum Winterthur.

 

Sieber has published a number of books, the latest two based on his work Character Thieves and Imaginary Club. 

 

Olaf Unverzart

Olaf Unverzart (Munich, Germany b. 1972) focuses on things, settling first on their appearances, their visibility, and in consequence also examining their inseparably connected invisible, hidden meaning. An eye-level perspective, the use of a normal lens and a general avoidance of any processing or other self-reflective or fictional possibilities of photography characterize his way of working. Therefore, Unverzart has no need to distance himself from the elementary possibilities of photography too much, either way his intention remains a great endeavor: probing the causes of things, their meanings and also their originators.

 

Robert Voit 

Robert Voit (Munich, Germany b. 1969) became known to a wider public with his series 'New Trees', a documentary about mobile phone masts camouflaged all over the world with giant coniferous tree, palm and cactus covers or, as can be seen in his series 'Fake America - Great Again', disguised as flagpoles or even church crosses.

 

Voit studied with Gerd Winner at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich before becoming Thomas Ruff's master class student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2001. From 2011 to 2013 Robert Voit taught as a lecturer and guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. With New Trees (Steidl, 2014) and The Alphabet of New Plants (Hatje Cantz, 2015), he presented two highly acclaimed monographs, each of which was awarded the German Photo Book Prize in silver. Robert Voit has received numerous prizes, including the Sophie Smoliar Award (2000), the European Architecture Photography Prize (2003), the hausderkunst Prize (2004) and the sponsorship of the International Lake Constance Conference. 

 

Janko Woltersmann

Janko Woltersmann (Hanover, Germany b. 1967) currently lives and works in Hanover, Germany as a freelance photographer.