Artists on Photography

Münchner Stadtmuseum – Awarding Institution

Founded in 1888, Münchner Stadtmuseum is Germany’s largest municipal museum. The Photography Museum (today the Photography Collection) was established in 1963 as an independent specialist museum and Germany’s first museum dedicated solely to photography. Today, it is one of the leading institutions for photography in Europe, with holdings of over three million items including almost one million photographs. Its collection ranges from the dawn of photography in the 1840s to the present digital era, with a focus on the nineteenth century as well as the period up to and including the 1980s. A robust acquisitions program for contemporary works means that the collection holdings are steadily being expanded. Beyond photographic images, the collection also comprises roughly forty archives, gifts and bequests, and special collections and an exceptional range of technical photography equipment. The collection’s unique specialized library is a trailblazer in Germany, with 25,000 volumes including books, rare volumes, and periodicals supplementing the aforementioned holdings. 

From January 2024 until approximately June 2031, Münchner Stadtmuseum will undergo a €270 million comprehensive renovation in order to address urgent architectural, user, and museum needs and to become fit for the future. 

A New Project Led by the Photography Collection

Artists on Photography is a new initiative by the Photography Collection which seeks to enhance its historical holdings by introducing current perspectives from artists and academics beneath others in the fields of gender theory and postcolonialism. This fellowship will be awarded annually over a period of five years commencing in 2025 to one artist and one academic, judged by an expert jury. There is no age limit. International fellows are welcome. Artists and researchers apply independently of each other and are brought together by the awarding institution.

Each year, one artist from anywhere in the world with an existing archival practice drawing on found footage and collections will receive a grant to carry out a commission. In tandem, a researcher will be invited to consider the same topic from an academic standpoint. Both will complete up to three short research visits together in Munich. The outcome will be a new work of art,a publication sharing the work created by the artist and the researcher, and an exhibition once the museum has reopened.

Topic

The cleft between the photographic objects which dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and computer-generated images which have become prominent over the past three decades has been widening in a new era defined by artificial intelligence. Yet again, photography finds itself confronted with a fresh challenge. How did earlier generations view photography? How has our understanding of the medium changed with the shift from analogue to digital photography, and now with the advent of computer-generated images? Which social practices have been introduced in an era of smartphone photography, virtual reality, and AI? Which photographic objects have drifted out of focus, disappearing into depositories? What light can those objects shed on the present day and how might we rediscover them?

2025 Focus: Travel and Souvenir Albums

The Photography Collection includes more than 250 albums from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including travel and souvenir albums from Germany, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. These holdings offer a broad overview of different photographic objects created during this period of time. These range from albums made by individuals to commercial albums where images that were taken by prominent professional photographers (e.g. Kusakabe Kimbei, Samuel Bourne, Samuel Boote), unnamed photographers, and amateurs alike could be stored. These photographs and albums reflect image practices of the past. Who in the nineteenth century was traveling to the Global South in order to take pictures? Who were their subjects, and who was purchasing these photographs and albums? How were different countries and their peoples represented? Which industrial structures underpinned photography in these different countries, or subsequently became established? What function did photography as a souvenir acquire over the nineteenth century and how did this change through more recent photographic practices and the fundamental shift to global networks? What afterlife do such images and their sometimes-brutal structures have in an era of artificial intelligence, where digital fragments of images are collaged to make new pictures? These and other questions will be addressed drawing on the holdings of the Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection.

The historical albums in the collection include the following exemplary selection. For organizational reasons, it is not possible to view originals on site before the fellowships are awarded. In your application, please refer to the exemplary selection of images on the website and the specific annual theme to be worked on during the project period.