deutsche fotothek fellowship

In 2024, the Deutsche Fotothek will celebrate its 100th anniversary. To mark this occasion, a photographic-artistic fellowship will be awarded in 2023 for a photographic work engaging with one of Germany’s largest image archives..

The Deutsche Fotothek was founded in Chemnitz in 1924 as the Sächsische Landesbildstelle (Saxon state image archive). Located in Dresden from 1925 onwards, it evolved into a photo archive on art history and cultural history with an increasingly universal aspiration after 1945. Today, with around 6 million media resources, the Deutsche Fotothek is a place for the preservation, professional archiving, research as well as web-based presentation of photographic works and estates of important German photographers or photographers working in Germany.

With the photographic-artistic fellowship we invite you to realise a photographic work on the Deutsche Fotothek. It will be added to the collection and presented as part of its centenary exhibition in 2024. Possible topics are the Fotothek as a place, its historical structure or functionality, or generally the dispositif of the photographic archive, the collection or individual photographic holdings as well as media focal points. The result should have a form which is suitable for storage in a photographic archive. Information on the Deutsche Fotothek can be found on this website.

The fellowship will be remunerated in the form of a work contract endowed with EUR 10,000 gross. This includes the acquisition of the work by the Deutsche Fotothek, travel expenses, the production of the work as well as taxes. Applications (German or English) should be submitted as PDF and include a synopsis of the planned project as well as a motivation letter and time schedule (max. 2 pages), work samples and a tabular CV. The on-site research at the Deutsche Fotothek should take place in the first six months of 2023 and the work should be handed over by 31st October 2023.