Germany’s most important competition for graduating photography students, gute aussichten: young german photography, will once again be presented from 10 March to 1 May 2017 in the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen. From a total of 77 nominations from 32 institutions, the jury selected seven prize winners, including two from Hamburg: Andreas Hopfgarten and Julia Steinigeweg.
Engaging with the self, the foreign, and the foreign as part of the self appears to be the unofficial theme of this year’s edition of gute aussichten. Prize winners such as Miia Autio from Finland and Holger Jenss from Tübingen traveled to Africa, where they themselves became foreigners.
Others, such as Chris Becher, Julia Steinigeweg, and Andreas Hopfgarten, discovered unusual things in their environment and captured them in their pictures. Carmen Catuti, who was born in Romania and lives in Berlin, traveled through Georgia, where she captured stunning images. Quoc-Van Ninh, who was born and grew up in Germany as the son of a Vietnamese father and a Chinese mother, visited Vietnam, but the foreign element that is always a part of himself was just as present there as here—dark and obscure.
All of them share the fact that they, the foreigners, always find part of themselves in the foreign. What appears to them—and to us—at first glance as rootless, mystical, or puzzling turns out to be the opposite upon closer examination. Only that to which we close our eyes remains foreign.
The exhibition presents a total of 280 photographs, six videos, three publications, two slide projections, one book, and for the first time 78 fretwork trees, a shower curtain, and a tree made of paper and ink as an object.
Prize Winners
Miia Autio (Fachhochschule Bielefeld)
Chris Becher (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
Carmen Catuti (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Andreas Hopfgarten (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg)
Holger Jenss (Kunsthochschule Kassel)
Quoc-Van Ninh (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)
Julia Steinigeweg (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg)
