Ralph Gräf

graef-photography.de

Ralph Gräf

In fall 2006, my scientific career as a cell biologist brought me from Munich to Potsdam near Berlin. Photography has escorted me through my whole adulthood. Yet, it was my move to Potsdam that triggered a more intensive involvement with photography, since here I found friends in the local photo club who gave me a great creative environment to spend a considerable part of my spare time for my creative talents that I have to neglect at my daily work. Together with ten of my friends I am organizing the “Fotogalerie Potsdam e.V.”, a successful gallery project to promote contemporary artistic photography. With my photos I want to stimulate the imagination

of the viewer and to tell a story that emotionally touches him, since sensing emotions is the prerequisite to keep pictures sticking in the viewer’s mind. I prefer available light and clearly composed pictures with a discreetly arranged motive. I like working with a series concept in mind that makes the photos more suitable for exhibitions and photo books. My photos are taken with digital cameras or analog medium format cameras with a wide range of lenses ranging from extreme wideangle to telephoto and plastic lenses, and often a tripod. Yet, to me the type of camera used to take the picture is rather unimportant. It is difficult to state names of other artists, who have inspired me, since there are many. In principle I could get inspirations by any picture

I’m watching. I’m trying not not copy somebody elses style but to find and create an own one. Among my favorite photographers are Gregory Crewdson, Nadav Kander, Andreas Gursky, Wim Wenders, and Peter Bialobrzeski, just to name a few. Since 2010 I’ve presented my photographic projects in twentysix well-acclaimed exhibitions in Berlin, Brandenburg/H., Potsdam, Munich, Frankfurt/M., Neubrandenburg, Lisboa, Milano and Gorzów Wielkopolski. At the 4th “Kunstallee Potsdam” (an arts fair) in 2011, I won the Arts Prize for my series “The Traveller” in an election of the approximately 4000 visitors. Several photos won prizes or were shortlisted in national and international photo contests, first of all the Sony World Photography Award, where I won the travel category and the Germany National Award in 2017. The series “Brandenburg unplugged” shows the German federal state of Brandenburg in a raw and “unplugged” way, far from the glowing metropolitan region of Potsdam with its famous palaces and gardens. The idea for this series was born shortly after my work-related relocation from Munich to Potsdam in 2006. Fascinated by many new impressions and the obvious rapid changes this region has undergone since the fall of the Berlin Wall, I immediately began to explore my new adopted home with my camera. At first of course, I did this mainly from the perspective of the astonished outsider. As I quickly learnt more about the land’s recent history and got to know the locals, I increasingly adopted the perspective of the insider. My pictures show many endearing

characteristics of this region. Often they show places telling little stories and also places that are changing or disappearing. To me, even after more than 13 years, Brandenburg is still a land of contrasts not only in comparison with the pulsating capital Berlin, which is completely surrounded by Brandenburg, but also when looking at different districts or quarters within the few larger cities.

While the “boomtown” of Potsdam is now the fastest growing state capital of Germany, many rural regions beyond the Berlin suburbs, which suffered most from the deindustrialization after the reunification, are still plagued by

depopulation. As a result, Potsdam and its immediate surroundings are now home to countless new housing developments. On the other hand, on the countryside and in many smaller towns one can still find dilapidated or abandoned buildings, and also charming curiosities and relics of the GDR era. In Potsdam’s city center, however, the architectural witnesses of this era have been almost erased and replaced by unimaginative historicizing buildings. Potsdam’s rapid growth goes hand in hand with extremely contrasting neighborhoods. New buildings, pretty old townhouses, and prefabricated concrete slab buildings, they all reflect,

more distinctly than in the West, the social stratification of this society. with the employees of the numerous scientific institutes, high-tech companies and ministries on the one hand and lowincome earners and welfare recipients on the other. Prosperity is also distributed quite differently between the regions. The administrative district of Potsdam Mittelmark which surrounds Potsdam, now has the highest per capita income in the whole of the post-GDR federal states, and the neighboring Brandenburg an der Havel is also enjoying growing popularity again. But the upswing of recent years has largely missed out on other regions especially in the north-east of the state, as evident on the face of these disadvantaged villages and small towns. Nevertheless, the last thirty years have been a success story for Brandenburg as a whole. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, the state has grown from the poorhouse of the “new states” into a respectable business location that does not have to hide behind no longer falling short of many of the old federal states.

The photo book (English/Deutsch) is available on request. Limited edition

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