Photography in Flux. 20 Years C/O Berlin Talent Award

The exhibition Photography in Flux. 20 Years C/O Berlin Talent Award features works by 14 selected award recipients in two chapters: Documentary Reality and Expanded Visual Worlds. On view are series that range from an examination of documentary image forms and genres to the dissolution of the “typical” photographic image itself, employing installation-based, conceptual, and multimedia approaches. Documentary photography is presented not as a fixed genre, but as a practice that is constantly evolving in response to technological and social conditions.

Like photography itself, the C/O Berlin Talent Award is in a state of constant change. After an initial open-theme call for submissions, the award most recently focused on “New Documentary Strategies” and explored the question of how photographic images can serve as documentation and how they relate to reality. As part of the C/O Berlin Talent Award, a total of 98 Artists and Writers have been honored since 2006.

The exhibition also features the complete publication series of the C/O Berlin Talent Award, comprising of 49 individual books. To mark the exhibition in Berlin, ten of the winning duos have reunited to reflect on their projects from today’s perspective. Visitors can access the resulting texts via a QR code next to the works.

Veronika Epple is a curator at C/O Berlin. She oversees the C/O Berlin Talent Award, a grant for emerging talent, which is aimed at young photographers and authors. Previously, she worked as a freelance research assistant for the Evelyn Richter and Ursula Arnold Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassen Stiftung at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. As a doctoral candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin, she is conducting research on East German documentary photography and university networks in the former GDR.

As part of the “Young Curators” grant program Veronika Epple is supported by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung. The program enables curators to conceive and implement exhibitions, optionally with an accompanying publication.