German photographer, born in 1958 in Moers and based in Hamburg; originally trained as a biologist. Historically, he is significant because he redefined nature photography within contemporary art, replacing spectacular wildlife imagery with a photography of minute relations, traces, and taxonomic uncertainty.
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German photographer, born in 1958 in Moers and based in Hamburg; originally trained as a biologist. Turned to photography in the late 1980s after earlier work in experimental film, and became known for black-and-white studies of plants, animals, traces, and perceptual phenomena.
The work is organized around animal and plant life, observation, perception, classification, ecological proximity, and the unstable border between scientific looking and poetic attention. Key examples include bodies of work shown in *Field Guide* and *Honeyguides and Milk Teeth*, as well as series such as *A Field (8 parts)*,; they are central because they show how Lempert builds meaning across groups of modest-sized photographs rather than through singular iconic prints. Formally, it is marked by hand-printed black-and-white photographs, 35mm camera work, conventional and experimental darkroom processes, unmounted and often unframed installation, and a sequencing method in which images operate relationally. The photographs are small, direct, and materially modest, but conceptually dense. This method matters because Lempert’s biological training matters because it gives his work scientific precision without turning it into illustration. His photographs test how observation changes once classification, analogy, and visual comparison enter the field of art. Historically, his work emerges after conceptual photography and after the Düsseldorf school had already expanded photography’s institutional presence, yet Lempert moves away from monumentality and spectacle toward small-scale attentiveness. In that sense, his practice belongs to a late twentieth-century reconsideration of what photographic knowledge can be.
Museum framing consistently emphasizes Lempert’s unusual position between biology and art, often treating that double background as essential to his historical significance. Cincinnati Art Museum’s presentation is especially useful because it stresses both the scientific rigor and poetic sensibility of the work, while also noting that his images question the very systems of classification through which viewers usually organize visual information. MACS extends this reception by foregrounding ecology, minutiae, and seriality; it presents the work as a practice in which no single image is sufficient and where meaning often emerges through relation and grouping.