Ricarda Roggan

From Literature and Space to Photography: Building a Room for a Single Image

Ricarda Roggan was born in Dresden. From 1996 she studied photography with Timm Rautert at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, receiving her diploma in 2002 and completing her Meisterschüler studies in 2004. She also studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 2003 to 2005, establishing the basis of her work in the late 1990s and early 2000s.^*1

In Roggan’s account, her path to photography began with literature and space, not with a fascination for cameras. As a child she was drawn to literature and enjoyed making rooms and thinking about spaces; photography initially served as a practical tool for those interests. She gradually recognized photography’s particular ability to fix the relationship between space and objects in a single image. In a 2021 conversation, she explained that once she reached a territory language could no longer fully describe, this process of turning a dialogue with objects into an image could, for her, happen only through photography.^*24 This helps explain why, in her work, “making the room” comes before taking the photograph: altering the set or space prepares it for the way it will appear on the photographic plane.

Kino, 1994–99: Photographing the Movie Screen as Another Reality

The early series Kino, made from 1994 to 1999, used high-speed 35mm film to photograph screens showing American movies in cinemas, then grouped the images into categories such as landscapes, cars, roads, disasters, and hotels. Spector Books situates the project within a pre-digital desire for the analog images produced by the movie theater.^*9 Roggan has also spoken about working as a projectionist; those memories later led to APPARATE, a series centered on projection equipment.^*2 Before her later photographs of furniture and abandoned interiors, Kino was already treating reality and “reality that has already become an image” as part of the same photographic question.

Seeking Objects After Use and Slowing Down Their Time

Roggan repeatedly turns to chairs, tables, beds, damaged cars, projectors, game machines, and empty rooms that have outlived their original function. She has described being drawn to objects that remain after losing their practical value.^*2 In a 2021 interview, she recalled that decades of use seemed to settle into the tears, corners, and surfaces of old furniture, and that she felt a need to preserve those objects once more as images before they were discarded.^*24 Old objects matter in her work because their surfaces retain the time of human use at the moment when that use is about to end. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation similarly describes her as a “photo-archaeologist” in search of traces, emphasizing her search for abandoned buildings and furniture and the strict procedures she uses to reduce chance.^*3 The Zabludowicz Collection connects her early furniture photographs to the material culture and memory of the former East Germany.^*15

8×10 Analog: Using a Slow Process to Decide Before Exposure

Roggan says she continues to use an 8×10-inch analog view camera because it lets her define a portion of reality with particular clarity and because the process is slow and labor-intensive.^*2 In another conversation, she noted that seeing a smartphone snapshot too early can determine the image too quickly and weaken the process of constructing the space mentally. With a large-format camera, she instead values the time spent thinking of the space in three dimensions, waiting, and searching for an image that is not yet visible.^*24 Large-format photography requires decisions about camera position, light, the placement of objects, and even small traces in the background before exposure. The essay “Von den Dingen,” published on Roggan’s website, emphasizes that she works directly on reality before the photograph is made, preparing the final image instead of substantially remaking the negative afterward.^*20 For Roggan, the slowness of large-format photography provides time to observe a space in three dimensions, decide where objects and the camera should be placed, and organize physical reality into a single image before exposure.^*24

Stuhl, Tisch und Bett and Schacht: Rebuilding the Room Before Photographing It

In her early furniture works, Roggan removed discarded chairs, tables, and beds from the places where she found them and repositioned them in sparse photographic settings. KW Institute for Contemporary Art notes that the objects can appear naturally placed at first glance, while the precision of the image reveals the staging; small interventions in the physical space detach them from their former meanings and uses.^*4 In Schacht and Attika, the interventions extend to the entire room. A 2008 Frieze review notes that the floor in Schacht was recast, windows and doors were sealed with plasterboard, and the spaces in Attika were thoroughly cleaned, challenging a simple reading of the work as photographs of East German ruins.^*8 FOTOHOF’s book Schacht/Attika/Stall likewise connects the nearly empty interiors and the detail of Roggan’s large-format photographs with memories of a disappearing East Germany.^*12

Garage, Baumstücke, and RESET: Applying the Same Rules to Cars, Forests, and Machines

Roggan applies the same process beyond interiors. In Garage, wrecked cars are placed in strongly frontal settings, making their damaged bodies resemble either advertising photographs or specimens. Galerie EIGEN + ART publishes images from Garage, Baumstück, SET, RESET, and other series, showing how Roggan continues to isolate her subjects, reduce their backgrounds, and create images that invite close scrutiny of detail even as the subjects change.^*6 “Von den Dingen” records that Roggan prunes branches and leaves when photographing forests and removes stickers and cleans surfaces in RESET, demonstrating that she does not preserve things exactly as she finds them.^*20 Sammlung Philara’s exhibition Ex Machina brought together such obsolete machines and devices, detached from their functions and presented as a kind of typology within carefully arranged spaces.^*16

SET / RESET: Reducing Obsolete Machines to the Photographic Plane

In SET / RESET, disused game machines and other equipment appear without the noise or users that once surrounded them, reduced to combinations of rectangles, apertures, screens, and fields of color. The book SET RESET EXITS SEDIMENTS brings together several series made around 2008–11, including work photographed in Cyprus, and sequences them around the time embedded in spaces and objects.^*7 The sequencing of the book is central. It places similarly quiet, structured images in succession, allowing objects that have lost their function to enter a different visual order without explaining the provenance of each one.

Apokryphen: Separating Personal Effects from Their Owners’ Stories

Apokryphen is a series of small gelatin silver prints depicting personal effects and relics associated with figures including Bach, Beethoven, Heidegger, Schnitzler, and Bloch under closely comparable conditions. The artist’s website lists works from 2013–15 and the specific objects they depict, including shells, eyeglasses, pocket watches, and hearing aids.^*11 In 2016, PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne acquired five works from the series and described Roggan’s method of removing commemorative objects associated with well-known figures from their original display contexts and placing them in a uniform, neutral setting.^*19 Spector Books published Apokryphen as a standalone volume devoted to the series.^*10 By leaving fingerprints, wear, and unusual forms visible instead of illustrating the owners’ biographies, the series creates a gap between knowing whose object it was and seeing what it looks like in the photograph.

1971: Restaging Timm Rautert’s Photograph Fifty Years Later

Presented in the 2022 MdbK Leipzig exhibition, 1971 (2021) reconstructs, roughly fifty years later in a former Leipzig spinning mill, Timm Rautert’s 1971 photograph of Walter De Maria’s New York studio. MdbK surveyed Roggan’s process of finding, transforming, and restaging places and objects before photographing them on analog film, placing this series between her earlier work and new production.^*5 Here, Rautert’s 1971 photograph becomes the reference for a restaging that is itself photographed again. The earlier photograph and the present-day space move back and forth within a single process of reconstruction and image-making.^*5

Offerte: Advertising Scale Without a Product Name

Offerte, made in 2016, enlarges photographs of two hands holding everyday objects; in 2021 the images were shown on outdoor billboards in Bremerhaven. Kunsthalle/Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven identifies the project’s central device as using the scale of advertising while withholding prices, product names, and promotional copy.^*14 When Roggan’s method of isolating small objects against nearly blank backgrounds is transferred to the scale of urban advertising, viewers instinctively look for what is being sold and receive no answer. The isolation created during photography and the choice of display medium produce the same uncertainty.

Rautert, Demand, and Wall: Comparing Documentation and Staging

Roggan studied with Timm Rautert, who had trained under Otto Steinert and worked both in social documentary and in Bildanalytische Fotografie (“image-analytical photography”), an inquiry into the mechanisms of photography itself. Rautert taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 1993 to 2008. Museum Folkwang lists Roggan among his students alongside Viktoria Binschtok and Tobias Zielony.^*23 The Zabludowicz Collection exhibition Recent Photography from Leipzig likewise brought together HGB graduates including Roggan, Binschtok, and Falk Haberkorn, describing their shared ground in careful objectivity, conceptual rigor, and sustained questioning of the photographic medium.^*22

Martin Hochleitner discusses Roggan’s spaces in relation to staged photography and distinguishes them from the “model worlds” of artists such as Thomas Demand: in Roggan’s photographs, an existing place and a constructed state remain present at the same time.^*21 The same essay refers to Jeff Wall’s “near documentary.” Roggan takes a different route, reducing traces of events in existing objects and places and arranging them into quiet images.^*21 Her staging can therefore be understood as a way of testing how far a real object or place can be transformed within a photograph while remaining materially itself.

East German Ruins and the Role of Staging in the Documentary Look

Roggan’s early work has often been discussed in relation to memories of East Germany because of her birthplace and the locations she photographed. The Zabludowicz Collection reads furniture and empty rooms as carriers of social memory, while FOTOHOF places the disappearance of East Germany among the work’s important backgrounds.^*15 A 2008 Frieze review cautioned that limiting the work to a romanticism of ruins overlooks Roggan’s process of rebuilding floors, sealing walls, and moving objects.^*8 Reading the early work solely as a record of a vanished East Germany leaves out a crucial part of how the images are made.The Zabludowicz Collection also notes that in Leipzig, in the former East Germany, inexpensive post-industrial spaces existed alongside active art schools and galleries, providing an important environment for younger photographers^*22. This does not reduce Roggan’s subjects to urban history, but it helps clarify the working environment in which HGB’s photographic education existed in close proximity to former industrial spaces. Because Roggan photographs real objects that carry historical traces only after reducing or rearranging those traces, documentation and staging remain visible in the same image.

Suspending the Time of Objects: Critical Readings of an Afterlife

In Roggan’s work, objects separated from their original locations or owners do not lose their histories completely. Writing on Apokryphen, Hubertus von Amelunxen argues that photography temporarily detaches an object from the time of its setting, allowing its history of use and its present appearance to be considered together. Drawing on Rilke, Heidegger, George Kubler, and Walter Benjamin, he reads Roggan’s objects as things in which past events seem to have stopped yet continue to appear in the present.^*25 This is a critic’s interpretation, not Roggan’s own philosophical declaration, but it offers one way to understand why she repeatedly photographs real objects that have lost a function or an owner instead of new ones.In Apokryphen, knowing an owner’s name and looking at wear, shape, and material in a small photograph happen simultaneously. The series depends on the fact that an object’s provenance never fully coincides with the surface presented by the photograph.

Japanese reception has likewise emphasized this act of looking at objects again.In 2005, Roggan participated in German Contemporary Photography at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, where her work was presented within German photography shaped by social change after reunification and the development of digital technology.^*18 In an essay published by ANDO GALLERY, Futoshi Hoshino emphasizes Roggan’s active interventions over objective classification and reads the photographs as giving objects that have lost their function another “afterlife.”^*17 Set against Roggan’s working process, this interpretation suggests that cleaning and repositioning create a degree of distance from an object’s former use and establish the conditions for seeing it again in a photograph.

From APPARATE to REVISION: Continuities Revealed by Retrospective Exhibitions

Since 2013, Roggan has taught photography at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, while her subjects have expanded from interiors to machines, cinema, and reenactment.^*1 A 2022 exhibition at the Leonhardi Museum brought together ATTIKA, BAUMSTÜCKE, APOKRYPHEN, the newer REVISION, and moving-image work, surveying her production since 2005.^*13 Across these changing subjects, the procedure persists: Roggan seeks objects and places that have lost their use or context, intervenes in physical reality, and fixes the result in analog photographs. The work repeatedly tests whether a photograph can still look like a record after the photographer has altered something that already carries a history.