Jochen Lempert

Why Photography? Letting Living Light and Movement Participate in Exposure

Lempert studied biology at the University of Hamburg, specializing in dragonflies. Scientific training gave him knowledge of species names as well as a procedure for sustained observation: following animal movement, subtle morphological differences, season, and habitat, and finding meaningful distinctions within similarity. A Centre Pompidou exhibition connected Lempert to the New Objectivity plant photographs of Karl Blossfeldt and others while emphasizing his departure from standardized close-up photography^*2. After shifting his focus toward photography in the 1990s, he continued walking through cities, parks, zoos, and natural history museums, bringing wildlife, living displays, taxidermy, and manufactured objects into the same photographic archive. As Brian Sholis observes, his scientific background works less as a rule for producing objective illustrations than as a way of discovering ecological questions in ordinary scenes^*16。

. Photography became necessary because it could produce a trace of a living phenomenon and light-sensitive material meeting in the same time, rather than describing the organism afterward. In works discussed by C/O Berlin, the light emitted by fireflies exposes film, while a small frog jumps across photographic paper and leaves footprints^*7. The animal is both subject and agent of exposure. Photography shifts from a one-directional record that preserves a human-selected, typical appearance toward a process in which living light, movement, contact, and the sensitivity of film or paper jointly form the image. This is why the Contemporary Art Gallery describes Lempert's treatment of animal and plant subjects as inseparable from the materiality of developing and printing^*9. Black-and-white grain and the small negative were choices that placed form, movement, surrounding space, and the trace of photographic material on one surface, instead of approximating a richly colored guidebook image of a species.

Schmelzdahin: From the Decomposition of Film to Still Photography

From 1979 to 1989, Lempert worked with Jochen Müller and Jürgen Reble in the experimental film group Schmelzdahin. They exposed found and already processed film to heat, chemical reactions, fungi, and other agents, using the physical breakdown of images as material. Centre Pompidou's Stadt in Flammen (1984) is catalogued as a 16mm work incorporating burned film, deterioration, and texture^*6. Lempert has not described a direct causal transition, but a continuity is visible between this experience and his later attention to exposure, grain, paper, and processing. After dismantling the continuity of moving images, he treated a single photograph less as a fixed conclusion than as one print that could be reconnected with others in space. A MACS project similarly places the links among film, photography, biology, natural science, and aesthetics at the center of his work^*12。 . Schmelzdahin treated film as matter that changed through heat, fungi, and chemical reaction. Later works in which firefly light acts directly on film and a frog crosses photographic paper can likewise be read as a continuation of an approach that allows biological movement and light to enter the photosensitive process, rather than treating photographic material as a passive recording surface^*7。

A 35mm Camera and an Ordinary Distance

Lempert works primarily with a 35mm camera and a standard lens. Centre Pompidou explains that the 50mm lens approximates ordinary human vision and avoids exaggerated macro effects^*2. Instead of isolating a rare animal with a telephoto lens, erasing its surroundings, and turning it into a heroic figure, he records how small a bird or insect appears within urban structures, sky, roads, and signs of human presence. The Cincinnati Art Museum organized Field Guide as an exhibition linking natural-science knowledge with everyday encounters^*10. The museum's press material likewise introduces the work as a long observation of the beauty and mystery of nearby nature through 35mm photography^*11. Grain from the small negative is not treated as a lack of information; it conveys the distance and conditions under which a subject was briefly visible. As The Bentway describes his attention to traces of nature in concrete urban environments, Lempert's “field” includes both protected habitat and the human city^*17. The portability of the 35mm camera allows encounters with organisms during ordinary movement, without isolating a research subject for the photograph.

Grain in Analog Prints and the Photogram

Hand-printed black-and-white photographs do more than reproduce details transparently. They retain grain, a soft paper surface, and slight fluctuations of tone. Mudam explains that strong contrast and grain give the photographs a quality close to drawing and recall photography's etymology as writing with light^*14. Alongside camera photographs, Lempert makes photograms by placing birds or objects directly on light-sensitive paper. In an IMA interview, he describes black-and-white photography as both abstract form and the surface of photographic paper, without separating what the image depicts from the trace light leaves on paper^*18. Lens-based perspective and the direct contact of an object's shadow with paper appear in the same installation, presenting the photographing of nature as a transformation through distance, exposure, chemistry, and support. An exhibition at Huis Marseille presented camera observation, photograms, and exhibition arrangement as one continuous body of work^*8。

Unframed Display: Constructing Conditions of Comparison Between Scientific Plate and Artwork

Lempert's prints are often pinned or taped directly to the wall without mats or glass. Their edges may curl slightly, making them resemble observation notes or specimen records more than protected valuables. Hamburger Kunsthalle describes his site-responsive groupings as dynamic networks of association assembled like an “open visual laboratory”^*1. In the IMA interview, Lempert identifies the unframed presentation as a means of strengthening relations among works and describes selecting and arranging photographs anew in each venue^*18. Meaning does not become freely interchangeable. Size, margins, intervals, and neighboring motifs constrain whether a grouping examines morphology, ecology, or perception. As Camera Austria notes, each move of the same photograph among a print, a book page, and different gallery arrangements brings the reproducible image into tension with the physical presence of paper^*24. The purpose of leaving works unframed is not flexibility for its own sake. It is a format for designing, in each venue, conditions under which morphology, ecology, and perception can be compared between the fixed explanation of a scientific plate and the uniqueness claimed for an artwork.

Belladonna Fruit and a Squirrel's Eye: Extending Formal Comparison into Ecology

Lempert's comparisons do not end with placing a flock beside a cloud or skin beside bark because the forms look alike. In Belladonna, discussed by the Contemporary Art Gallery, a black belladonna berry is paired with a squirrel's dark eye, suggesting how fruit attracts animal vision and enters relations of feeding and seed dispersal^*9. Brian Sholis likewise identifies the movement from formal resemblance toward an evolutionary hypothesis as a characteristic of the work^*16. The two photographs do not “prove” a biological causal relation. Human viewers cannot fully share how a squirrel perceives color and shape, so the pairing functions less as a closed scientific diagram than as a question that uses observed form to imagine another species' vision. Elsewhere, taxidermy, animal-patterned fabric, and manufactured objects such as a frog-shaped soap dish join photographs of living organisms, bringing human imitation, decoration, and preservation of nature into the comparison^*23. Lempert does not discard species names; he moves among knowing a name, being surprised by form, and considering ecological action.

Schwammtürme: Seeing One Species Across a Long Duration

《Schwammtürme is a series of gelatin silver prints made between 1995 and 2016^*5. The title means “sponge towers.” Instead of allowing one typical photograph to stand for a subject, the series returns to it in different places, forms, and light. Its long duration preserves individual variation and photographic conditions that the standardized image of a field guide would remove. The series confirms a shared species while showing that no two forms completely coincide.

Symmetrie & Körperbau: An Exhibition for Comparing Leaves

《Symmetrie & Körperbau: About Leaves (2019–22) consists of multiple works examining leaf form, symmetry, and bodily structure. Centre Pompidou's collection record indicates that the individual photographs belong to a separable set^*4. Images resembling botanical specimens appear beside leaves marked by shadow or damage, presenting a leaf as a thin body that receives light and whose bilateral symmetry can fail, as well as a sign for species identification. In exhibitions, these works may neighbor photographs of animals or manufactured objects, extending the “body structure” named in the title beyond the plant.

Glühwürmchen: From One Image to Several Images of Movement

Mudam's Glühwürmchen (Bewegung auf 35 mm film) (2010) shows the movement of a firefly across four black-and-white photographs^*14. Points and paths of light do not anatomically describe the insect, but they directly link biological movement to the duration of the photosensitive material. Following the intervals among four images joins the analytic logic of sequential photography with the bodily experience of searching for light in darkness. Bildmuseet's Sudden Spring introduced such transient natural events as works in which classification intersects with chance encounter^*15。

Scientific Representation and Human-Made Images of Nature

Lempert is often described as an artist who combines “the precision of a biologist with poetic sensitivity.” The work, however, addresses less the harmony of science and poetry than the kinds of images institutions for knowing nature require. Camera Austria argues that systems of scientific representation collide in his photographs with personal observation undertaken while walking through cities, zoos, and natural history museums^*23. In the IMA interview, Lempert explains that even an industrial product can be seen through a biological eye and declines to fix a division between natural and artificial objects^*18. Retrospective presentations in Japan have likewise evaluated the work as moving among wildlife, traces in the city, specimens, and photographic materials^*19. As an ART iT review suggests, the quietness of the photographs turns attention back on what viewers recognize as living and what they dismiss as background or artifact^*20. Knowledge of species helps locate minute differences, while grain, cropping, and adjacency on the wall restore environment and the observer's position that specimen photography often removes.

From Species Identification to the Study of Perception and Ecology

Nature photography has long valued close views of rare animals, decisive acts of predation, and grand habitats. Lempert treats flies, moths, weeds, ripples of rain, urban birds, and museum specimens through small 35mm negatives and hand prints. Because he leaves surrounding space, grain, and the distance to the subject in view instead of enlarging it into total clarity, viewers consider how an organism appears within a human city or exhibition system as well as identifying its species. Acquisitions by the Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart and Centre Pompidou position the work institutionally across photography, science, and display^*13. An acquisition supported by the Amis du Centre Pompidou likewise brought his method of treating several photographs as a separable group into a museum collection^*21. In the Rijksmuseum photobook Natural Sources, the long archive is reedited through a sequence of pages distinct from wall display^*22. Frieze likewise positions the work as an inquiry into modes of seeing through exhibition adjacency, rather than a closure of animal and plant images within a taxonomy^*3. Lempert demonstrated that an image made for natural-historical identification can also examine mimicry, interspecies relations, animal vision, photographic material, and human projection. The question continues beyond “What species is this?” to “For whom, and for what act of seeing, did this appearance become an image?”