Erik Steinbrecher

A 1990s Practice That Did Not Separate Architecture, Sculpture, Photography, and Publishing

Steinbrecher was born in Basel in 1963 and has been based in Berlin. A biography from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin records his work across photographic installation, moving image, objects, sculpture, graphics, and artist books, as well as his participation in documenta X in 1997^*3. HFBK Hamburg materials likewise document a career since the mid-1990s in which exhibitions and publications such as Prospekte, Farmpark-Box, COUCH, Baumann, and Gras developed in parallel^*16.

His architectural training at ETH is an important background for understanding the later books and installations. Akademie Schloss Solitude records that Steinbrecher studied architecture at ETH Zürich, worked in the offices of Miroslav Šik and Hans Kollhoff, and served as an assistant at ETH from 1992 to 1994 while already making drawings, objects, photographs, and spatial installations^*24. The parallel treatment of architecture, objects, and images begins in this period. Architectural experience with walls, circulation, and placement overlaps from the outset with the cutting out, sequencing, and repositioning of images. In the later books and archives, where an image is placed and what it is placed beside matters as much as what the image depicts.

Photography has a different role from sculpture or architecture in Steinbrecher’s work. It is easily reproduced, portable, available for cutting out, and capable of repeated insertion into new sequences. Les presses du réel describes his activity along two broad axes—architecture/sculpture and photography/publishing—and notes that the publications themselves function as autonomous works^*5.

Couch Park: More Than 20,000 Images as a Working Foundation

Couch Park exposes a vast image archive that Steinbrecher assembled from newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, and reproductions. MoMA presented it as an open-studio-like environment in which more than 20,000 images—covering cities, bodies, nature, technology, sexuality, violence, and more—could be rearranged and related to one another^*1. KW Institute for Contemporary Art likewise describes it as a “park of images” in which photographs, clippings, and reproductions are detached from their original settings and presented with equal intensity^*2.

Why Collect and Arrange? Keeping Images Mobile Rather Than Preserved in Place

Steinbrecher’s image archive does not culminate in preservation. In a 2017 conversation, he says, “I like to categorize. It’s a game,” and explains that his rapid scanning of an older image collection was motivated, if anything, by a wish to “get rid of these images”^*25. When the interviewer reframes this as preservation and archiving, the discussion turns to the same “attention to images” being directed toward everyday and purchased objects scattered around the studio^*25. Collected images and objects remain working material that can be repeatedly classified, altered, and rearranged. The continual reconfiguration of more than 20,000 images in Couch Park reflects his refusal to fix the archive as a completed order.

Within this archive, the photographer’s name or the publication in which an image appeared does not determine its first reading. A photograph from a luxury magazine, an anonymous clipping, and one of Steinbrecher’s own images can acquire different meanings through adjacency. Treating photographs as images already circulating through society became a foundation for his later publications.

Making Photographs and Selecting Photographs Part of the Same Work

In Steinbrecher’s method, making a new photograph with a camera is not clearly ranked above finding, reproducing, and arranging an existing image. Material for Galerie Barbara Weiss’s Counter Images discusses his work as a practice of subtly estranging existing everyday objects and images through operations of imaging, reproduction, casting, imitation, copying, and doubling^*4. Instead of rejecting originality as an abstract principle, he changes the conditions around an image through concrete operations.

Photography’s reproducibility allows the same image to move into books, walls, copies, and rephotographs. Each change of medium and adjacency alters its meaning. In Couch Park, collecting becomes exhibition; in HITS, the accumulation is transformed into page order. Reproducibility itself becomes a concrete condition for producing associations among images.

HITS: Turning Thirty Years of Collecting into a Sequence of Pages

HITS (2015) edits photographs, illustrated books, press and magazine images, archival material, and montages collected over roughly thirty years into a 169-page large-format book. Les presses du réel describes it as a book that presents the vast collection as an associative collage^*6. University of Toronto Press Distribution likewise records the long-term collecting and editing behind a publication containing roughly 200 color illustrations^*7.

With little explanation attached to individual images, the reader follows relations among forms, gestures, colors, and abrupt shifts of subject while turning the pages. Sequence, spread, repetition, and interval produce the relations among photographs. The registration of more than fifty related publications in edcat further indicates the centrality of publishing to Steinbrecher’s work^*13.

Mondfotografie: Rephotographing the “Moon Photograph”

In Mondfotografie (2014), Steinbrecher collects existing photographs of the moon and places a finger in front of the lens while rephotographing them. According to Les presses du réel, this occlusion turns images of the full moon into dark crescent-like forms, producing a 46-page artist book about the act of reading a photograph^*10. edcat also records the publication as a photobook issued by Edition Patrick Frey^*11.

Steinbrecher manipulates photographs already circulating as images of “the moon.” An extremely simple intervention—a finger—changes the apparent lunar phase while leaving the photograph’s indexical character intact; only the interpretation is rewritten. A photobook exhibition at the Swiss National Library likewise presented the book as an example that reconsiders photography’s possibilities and explained the simulation of lunar phases with a finger^*12. The subject is the set of conditions under which the same recorded image can be read as something else through a simple intervention and a change of context.

Superfundi: Building an Imaginary Territory from Hills, Trenches, and Graves

Superfundi (2007) sequences black-and-white photographs of hills, trenches, and graves in a magazine-like format. Les presses du réel explains that, while each image is a fragment of topography, their sequence creates a primitive, devastated “strange territory”^*8. edcat records it as a 64-page artist book organized around Graves, Hills, Topography, and Trenches^*9. The Centre de la photographie Genève published the book and co-published Stubborn Statue in the same year^*14.

Through repetition of anonymous terrain, an imaginary geography comes to the fore more strongly than the identification of individual sites. As Le Journal des Arts records the exhibition of the same title at the Centre de la photographie Genève, the book and exhibition allow the same sequence to be experienced at different speeds^*15.

Stubborn Statue: Reading Press Photographs Without Their “Information Value”

Stubborn Statue, made with Tomas Kadlcik in 2007, consists of photographs that the Keystone press agency did not distribute because they were considered to lack sufficient “information value” for newspapers. According to Art Metropole, the two artists selected these rejected candidates, removed captions from the images in the body of the book, and assembled them into a publication^*28.

The book makes concrete the fact that the meaning of a press photograph does not reside in the image alone. Pictures that were useless to a news desk become, through a new selection and sequence, a strange chain detached from the task of explaining an event^*28. The editing that discards a photograph and the editing that retrieves it for a book assign different values to the same material. The selection of existing images that continues in Couch Park and HITS is therefore tied not only to private collecting but to the institutional decisions through which mass media determine what counts as a useful photograph.

Making the Artist Book the Work Itself

The catalog of Edition Patrick Frey, publisher of Mondfotografie, lists both Gras and Mondfotografie as part of Steinbrecher’s sustained photographic publishing activity^*17. Motto Distribution likewise treats Mondfotografie as an autonomous artist book in which existing images of the moon are rephotographed and transformed into new images^*18. JRP Editions’ Minimalist Kitsch is a monograph bringing together concise interventions into sculpture, everyday objects, and images, showing that Steinbrecher’s method of changing meaning through minimal gestures extends beyond photobooks^*19.

Artist as Publisher: Joachim Schmid, Céline Duval, and a Shared Contemporary Field

By the 2010s, collecting existing images and re-editing them as books was clearly recognized as a contemporary field spanning photography and publishing. At Friends With Books in 2015, Steinbrecher, Joachim Schmid, Céline Duval, and Elisabeth Tonnard were invited to the same panel on the “artist and author as publisher,” discussing strategies of image collection, sequencing, and publication^*26. The following year, One Thousand Books similarly placed Schmid, who had worked with found photographs since the early 1980s, and Steinbrecher, who collects mass-media imagery and produces numerous printed works as autonomous pieces, within the same artist-book context^*27. Both weaken the assumption that only the photographer who made an exposure can author a photographic work, but sculpture and everyday objects always remain active outside the book in Steinbrecher’s work. His distinctive approach to editing lies in the movement among page, object, and exhibition space, including works in which objects are placed on found photographs and rephotographed^*22.

This extensive publishing activity is not a cataloging system for circulating finished works. The format of the book itself removes images from a fixed wall, allows them to be handled and seen in sequence, and makes them portable. Photography’s capacity for circulation is converted directly into artistic form.

Dissolving the Boundary Between Image and Object in the Exhibition

STAMPA’s artist materials summarize a long exhibition history moving among photographs, objects, installations, and publications^*20. In Steinbrecher’s exhibitions, printed images do not simply line the walls; they sit beside sculpture and furniture-like structures, changing the viewer’s bodily position in relation to the image. Couch Park was both a place for browsing an archive and an installation, clearly showing his refusal to confine photography to a framed plane.

Books, Photographs, and Objects in the Same Exhibition Space

Steinbrecher’s photobooks do not function merely as records assembled after an exhibition. A 2013 Frieze review, noting that he had produced more than one hundred printed works including books, posters, invitations, and inserts, discusses exhibitions in which photography, moving image, sculpture, collage, and found objects enter into reciprocal relations with printed matter, almost as one another’s “appendages”^*22. Placing found objects on found photographs and rephotographing them so that separate materials appear to occupy one physical space is part of the same refusal to fix the boundary among photograph, object, and page.

The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin exhibition UBER ALLES likewise placed artist books alongside film, photography, and sculpture and described a structure in which the exhibition’s graphic layout continued into a book^*23. A book is both a reproductive medium and an object that is handled, sequenced, and combined with other things. For Steinbrecher, the meaning of a photograph is not contained within the print; it is continually revised by its placement on a page, in a case, on a wall, or beside another object.

Opening Photographic Authorship to Editing in the Age of Found Images

After the 1990s, photographs were increasingly read within a mass image environment that included newspapers, magazines, advertising, photocopies, and the internet as well as museum prints. Steinbrecher did not turn that environment into a topic to be explained; he incorporated collecting and rearrangement directly into the production process. In Couch Park, more than 20,000 images are organized by association rather than author name, while HITS turns thirty years of material into the rhythm of pages^*1.

The photographer’s work here includes editing: selecting an existing image, deciding what will sit beside it, and choosing the medium through which it will be shown. edcat’s bibliography of Steinbrecher’s numerous artist books confirms that this has formed a structural basis of his work for decades^*13.

Putting Reproduction and Rearrangement at the Center of Photography

Steinbrecher’s significance for photographic history lies in placing photography’s social circulation as a reproducible object at the center of production. In Mondfotografie, existing moon photographs become different lunar phases through rephotography; in Superfundi, photographs from separate sites become one imaginary territory through editing. Meaning does not end with the negative or the place photographed. It is revised through the copy, the finger, the page, the spread, and the exhibition site.

One reason photography remains useful to Steinbrecher is its ability to convert three-dimensional objects and places into thin, portable images that can be repeatedly redeployed as copies, rephotographs, prints, pages, and wall works. As Frieze records, his act of placing found objects on found photographs and rephotographing them so that separate materials appear to occupy the same space makes that portability especially clear^*22. His architectural sense of space, the classification of archives, and the sequencing of artist-book pages all connect to a treatment of the image as an object whose position can be changed.

The more reproducible the image, the more exacting selection and sequencing become. Choosing which copy to use and in what order images will encounter one another becomes an artistic decision. Working across museums, photography centers, publishers, and bookstores, Steinbrecher extends photography from the individual print into an object of visual culture shaped by editing and circulation. In a history of photography after the 1990s told through archives and artist books, he can be situated as an artist who connects making photographs with reading images that already exist.

In Relation to Jeff Wall: The Constructed Single Image and the Edited Sequence

Comparing Steinbrecher’s 1990s work with contemporary photography clarifies where he places authorship. Frieze compares Farmpark (1997) at documenta X with Jeff Wall’s lightbox Milk (1984), since both inserted unexpected narratives into advertising space in Kassel, but notes a crucial difference: Wall meticulously constructed a single instant, whereas Steinbrecher used sixteen found images to build a chain of oscillations between similar and different, familiar and strange^*21. Both present large photographs in public space, yet Wall concentrates authorial control within a single constructed scene while Steinbrecher disperses authorship across selection, sequence, and placement.

The contrast reflects a broader post-1990s expansion of authorship from taking photographs to selecting and editing existing ones. Frieze describes Steinbrecher’s work of the period as editing found photographs and his own images into sequences resembling “stories without plots,” then presenting them in vitrines and books^*21, This provides a basis for reading Couch Park and the later books as a continuous editorial practice. Steinbrecher’s distinguishing feature is the treatment of photographing, finding, reproducing, and rearranging as artistic acts on the same level.