Alexandra Lechner is a photographer in Frankfurt/M. After training as a photographer, she studied photo design at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences from 1993 to 1998. Since then she has been working as a freelance photographer in Frankfurt in the field of portrait and corporate photography for advertising/PR agencies, editorial offices and companies. In addition to commissioned photography, she is represented in exhibitions with her freelance photography projects.
In 2005 she co-founded the festival “Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie” and developed it into one of the major photography festivals in Germany. Since 2010, the founding of “RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain”, she has been part of the curatorial team of the RAY Triennale.
we will have been young – East Asian Photography Masterclasse, dienacht Publishing, 2017
I have been traveling to Thailand on and off for several years and have also visited countries such as Myanmar and Cambodia. On these trips I observe with great interest how the young people there live. That’s why the small book with the sensitively photographed series of 12 photographers from 8 countries in Southeast Asia and the exhibition compiled from it at the Basis Frankfurt immediately appealed to me.
The photography projects of the South-East Asian Photography Masterclass (during the Festival Obscura 2016/17 in Georgetown, Malaysia) deal with “Youth and Future”. The works document youthful life in the context of economic progress and globalization in Southeast Asia. The series tell of social phenomena, questions of identity, relationships, digitalisation of life, cultural changes, questions about the future. I was surprised that the pictures – despite all social and cultural differences – speak a globally understandable language of youth.
The masterclass was led by Jörg Brüggemann and Tobias Kruse. It was a project of the Goethe-Institut in Malaysia in cooperation with Ostkreuz Fotografenagentur Berlin.
My travels through the world on my copy machine – Dominique Teufen, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2019
Mountains, lakes with mountain panoramas, beaches and glittering water surfaces: Every page of this book is reminiscent of landscapes from long ago. Black and white, a bit streaky scratched, the images play with perception and memory. The Swiss artist Dominique Teufen creates her pictures in an experimental way on the photocopier. The resulting images explore the moment between reality and illusion. Analog, direct and without digital filters. Teufen pushes the technical possibilities of this everyday device to its limits. She arranges different materials on the copier and also uses the coincidence of reflections and traces of light.
When I pick up the high-quality produced book, I am fascinated every time by the many facets and new details that I discover in the pictures. And every now and then I even think I recognize a familiar mountain or beach.
Girl on Girl – Art and photography in the age of the female gaze, Laurence King Publishing, 2017
Girl on Girl fell into my hands while researching works for self-staging. The cover photo of the artist Isabelle Wenzel had made me curious. For this volume, British-Sri Lankan author Charlotte Jansen spent three years interviewing 40 contemporary women photographers. The book examines how the artists’ images explore identity, femininity, sexuality, and feminism.
As a democratic medium, photography plays an important role in the emancipation and liberation of women. Women look at the world and the female body differently. The artists in this book, however, do not want to be seen as “women” or “feminists”, but rather want to tell us something about the world – from their very own female perspective.
The photographic works show an enormous range from whimsical self-staging to sensitively photographed essays. The diversity of topics and the creativity. That’s what I love about this book and why I keep picking it up.
