Dörte Eißfeldt

Stehen Liegen Hängen

The Photobook as an Experimental Archive

In the mid-1970s, Dörte Eißfeldt (b. Hamburg, 1950; lives and works in Neuenkirchen and Hamburg), whose background was in painting and film, increasingly turned her attention to photography. To the artist’s mind, the engagement with this medium implies working with fragments of reality, and so her montages, multiple exposures, and experimental series gesture not so much toward a reality existing outside them as rather to the photographic process of their genesis.

In her artist’s book Stehen Liegen Hängen, Dörte Eißfeldt takes us to the place where her pictures have been coming into existence, her studio—the central point of reference in her oeuvre. She shares with us her personal view of her works, of combinations and situations in the studio. The prints change their positions, are pinned to the wall with clips and magnets, hung upside down, placed upright, on the floor, folded. She also uses the pages of the book to compose the works, to encounter them again and again. In this way, Eißfeldt translates her ongoing manipulation of photographic material into the medium of the book, flanked by essays by Steffen Siegel and Rebecca Wilton.