photo basel | Beyond Photography

Esther Hagenmaier (*1975) lives and works in Ulm/G. The artist was appointed to the renowned Deutsche Fotografische Akademie in 2017. In the same year, she was awarded the Opus Fotopreis (2nd prize) and worked as an artist in residence at the Altes Spital in Solothurn.

At photo basel 2024, we are showing works from her central series "shaped photographies" in the special exhibition "Beyond Photography". The starting point is architecture, our built environment. Esther Hagenmaier can justifiably be described as a fan of the buildings of Swiss sculptor and architect Walter Maria Förderer. She has often photographed his churches and community centres in Chur, Heremence and Luzern. Her special treatment allows the actual buildings to fade more or less into the background.

Her photographs can conceal a church, a residential building or a simple transformer station. Materials such as exposed concrete or metal, edges, openings, projections and recesses, shadows and the blue of the sky remain recognisable. The "shaped photographs" leave the usual rectangular format and sometimes even the picture plane.

For Esther Hagenmaier, photography is not an image, but the art of conveying or simulating new images or spaces. The artist crops her photographs in such a way that the image and the crop form a new formal unity. Reduced forms and colours in refined formats are characteristics of her restrained, quiet art.

It is fascinating how much abstraction from the concrete is possible with the means of photography. How formally exciting and at the same time lyrical sections of our environment can look. With Esther Hagenmaier's photographs in mind, we can see our built world anew.