Andreas Mühe

ABC

„Es muss so aussehen, als ob man an einer offenen Tür vorbeigeht...

… quickly peek inside, and the scene that’s taking place there gets stuck on your mind”—that’s how the 32-year-old photographer Andreas Mühe (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1979; lives and works in Berlin) describes the effect he hopes his pictures will have. Like the photograph of Helmut Schmidt’s office he chose for the cover of this book. In fact, he leaves nothing to chance, staging each setting down to the smallest detail. Deliberate selection of the space and precise lighting have become his trademark.
His unconventional style has made Mühe the shooting star of the German photography scene and a sought-after portraitist of prominent politicians and celebrities such as Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the Italian ambassador Antonio Puri Purini, Christiane zu Salm, and Gerhard Richter.
Mühe takes analog photographs using a large-format camera. Whether he captures people or landscapes, his pictures are always surrounded by an aura of artificiality and unreality, exuding a sense of gloom and even menace. “I play with the dimensions of space and time and show the individual in context.”

The present book is the first comprehensive monograph about Andreas Mühe’s art. It includes a captivating characterization of the artist himself by the writer Jana Hensel—she, too, was born in East Germany—and essays by the critic Kito Nedo and the curator Ingo Taubhorn.