Thomas Kellner a Member of the German Photographic Academy
Thomas Kellner is a member of the German Photographic Academy (DFA). In May 2026, the Bonn-born photographer took part in the Academy’s annual meeting at the MARCHIVUM in Mannheim, where he presented his artistic work. His admission to the DFA is part of a sustained engagement with the possibilities of photography that has shaped his practice since the 1990s, particularly his use of analog 35mm film, serial photographic processes, and the reconstruction of photographic subjects.
At the annual meeting, Kellner presented his lecture, “Pandemic Trilogy: From Bernd and Hilla Becher through the Chapel Schools to August Sander.” In it, he examined key connections between his own practice and the history of photography, linking his engagement with photographic typologies to his use of serial, analog processes. At the same time, he addressed the question of how photographic images do not merely document reality, but can make it newly perceptible through selection, fragmentation, and construction.
Membership in the German Photographic Academy is therefore part of a continuous artistic development. Kellner’s photographic work combines the material qualities of analog film with a conceptual investigation of perception, time, and photographic reality. His admission to the DFA places this artistic position within a professional dialogue with photographers, artists, and specialists concerned with the historical and contemporary possibilities of photography as an art form.
Thomas Kellner at the 2026 DFA Conference in Mannheim
May 2-3, 2026, members and guests of the German Photographic Academy (DFA) gathered in Mannheim for their annual conference. For Thomas Kellner, the conference provided an important professional context for presenting his photographic work. His presentation combined an exploration of historical approaches to photography with his own artistic practice, thereby directly addressing the questions that have shaped his work for decades: How is a photographic image created, and how does its construction alter our perception?
The German Photographic Academy Visits the MARCHIVUM
The annual conference took place at the MARCHIVUM, Mannheim’s center for urban history and remembrance culture. The institutional setting was particularly well-suited to the character of the German Photographic Academy: The focus was not solely on individual photographic works, but on professional dialogue about photography as an artistic medium, its history, and its current possibilities.
For Thomas Kellner, the conference provided an opportunity to contribute his own perspective to this discourse. His work straddles the line between a documentary starting point and a constructed visual reality. The analog photographic process itself becomes an integral part of the image, making the creation of the photographic work transparent.
Two Days Dedicated to Art Photography
The DFA conference brought together diverse photographic approaches, historical perspectives, and contemporary issues. Lectures and discussions sparked a professional exchange on the role of photography at the intersection of documentation, artistic construction, and individual perception. For Thomas Kellner, this dialogue was particularly relevant because his own work repeatedly explores the boundaries between photographic capture and conceptual image-making.
His lecture, “Pandemic Trilogy: From Bernd and Hilla Becher, Through the Chapel Schools, to August Sander,” established a connection between the history of photography and his own artistic development. The artists mentioned represent different forms of serial and typological engagement with reality. Kellner draws on these historical references but develops them further based on the possibilities offered by analog photographic processes.
The DFA conference thus highlighted that contemporary photography cannot be understood independently of its history. Kellner’s work engages in an ongoing dialogue with photographers and photographic concepts that shaped the medium in the 20th century. At the same time, he develops an independent visual language from these influences, in which fragmentation, movement, and reconstruction become central compositional tools.
The presentation in Mannheim is thus part of a series of international exhibitions that have featured Thomas Kellner’s work since the 1990s. Against this backdrop, his subsequent admission to the German Photographic Academy should be understood as an institutional recognition of his long-standing artistic engagement with the medium of photography.
Thomas Kellner Speaks About his “Pandemic Trilogy”
At the 2026 DFA Conference in Mannheim, Thomas Kellner presented “Pandemic Trilogy 2020–26,” a series of three bodies of work created during and in the context of the pandemic: “Half-Timbered Houses in the Siegen Industrial Area Today,” “Chapel Schools,” and “Facets of the Metropolis According to August Sander.” Kellner does not view these works as a direct reaction to the pandemic. Rather, the changed living and working conditions became the structural prerequisite for a renewed examination of his homeland and the question, “What shapes us?”
From Bernd and Hilla Becher to August Sander
The starting point for his reflections was the unique photographic history of the Siegen region. Bernd Becher was born in Siegen, and August Sander lived just a few kilometers away in Herdorf. During the pandemic and the resulting restrictions on his international travel, Kellner therefore turned his attention more intensely to his immediate surroundings. In doing so, he brought together three photographic approaches: the Bechers’ typology, deconstruction as a distinct artistic method, and Sander’s exploration of society through the photographic portrait.
This connection is central to understanding the three groups of works. Kellner does not merely present them side by side in chronological order, but describes them as three distinct levels of a shared photographic exploration: typology, deconstruction, and social commentary.
Photography Between Typology, Fragment, and Reconstruction
In “Half-Timbered Houses of the Siegen Industrial Area Today,” Kellner engaged directly with the photographic concept of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The starting point was existing photographs of the half-timbered houses, which were developed into an independent artistic investigation during the lockdown. He was not interested in the romantic image of half-timbered architecture, but rather in its transformation and the question of how the concept of typology can be reimagined under changed historical conditions.
The chapel schools steered this investigation in a different direction. Kellner explicitly emphasized that this series is not a typology in the classical sense. Rather, the buildings are viewed as isolated architectural forms that simultaneously embody social history. The contact sheet and the possibilities of movement and change developed by Kellner thus become independent formal instruments.
The connection to the Bechers remains visible, however: One of the chapel schools they photographed no longer exists today, while Kellner continued the theme through his own extensive research. Thus, the historical reference becomes not a quotation, but a starting point for a new photographic inquiry.
“Facets of the Metropolis” after August Sander
With “Facets of the Metropolis” after August Sander, Thomas Kellner shifts the focus from architecture and space to people. The starting point is August Sander’s attempt to make society visible through the medium of photography. Kellner takes up this historical question but consciously chooses not to simply reproduce Sander’s classification system. Instead, he develops an open model designed to capture social diversity under contemporary conditions.
For the project, Kellner analyzed, among other things, statistical data from the city of Siegen and photographed exclusively within the city limits. The portraits do not constitute closed social categories. Rather, a growing photographic archive emerges in which individual people and social structures become visible simultaneously. Dr. Thomas Meyer highlights precisely this connection: Kellner directs his gaze toward the individual while simultaneously capturing them as part of the social structures of their time.
This brings the “Pandemic Trilogy” full circle: from the architectural object, through space, to the human being. Kellner himself describes the common structure of the three series as “series, repetition, and systematics” and summarizes their progression as a shift “from the object, through space, to the subject.” The pandemic was not the actual subject of the images, but rather the structural condition that made this methodological condensation of his photographic practice possible.
Thomas Kellner's Apointment to the German Photographic Academy
The German Photographic Academy (DFA) has been dedicated to artistic photography for more than a hundred years. It was founded on August 18, 1919, in Eisenach as the “Society of German Photographers” and today explicitly views photography as an independent form of visual art. Its focus is on the discussion, presentation, and promotion of artistic photography, as well as on the exchange of different photographic perspectives and their theoretical reflection.
Headquartered in Mannheim, the DFA is now closely connected to the city’s photography museum scene. Since 2021, its headquarters have been located at the rem gGmbH Foundation Museums; its collaboration with the Forum Internationale Photographie and ZEPHYR – Raum für Fotografie at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums provides an important institutional framework for its activities.
An institution for fine art photography
The history of the DFA dates back to the early days of photography as an independent artistic medium. In 1993, the Society of German Photographers was renamed the German Photographic Academy. Its historic members included numerous prominent photographers in the history of German photography. Today’s DFA continues this tradition, but also explicitly focuses on contemporary photography and new photographic approaches.
The DFA does not see itself merely as a professional association. According to its own description, it discusses, exhibits, and promotes artistic photography publicly, on a nonprofit and noncommercial basis. Of particular importance in this context are diverse perspectives, contradiction, theoretical reflection, and intellectual openness. According to the DFA, its collegial network forms a fundamental structure of the academy.
Appointment in Recognition of Photographic Work
Membership in the DFA involves a special appointment process. According to the system described by the DFA, artists who have distinguished themselves through their photographic work over an extended period of time are appointed. The process begins with a presentation to the Executive Committee; the Executive Committee then decides on membership.
For Thomas Kellner, this membership thus fits into the context of a photographic practice that has evolved over decades. His work combines analog photography with serial processes, deconstruction, and reconstruction, repeatedly exploring the conditions of photographic perception. Membership in the DFA provides an institutional framework in which this approach is not only presented but also integrated into an ongoing professional and artistic dialogue.
Photography as a Shared Discourse
The DFA combines historical experience with a dialogue on contemporary forms of photographic art. Its conferences and presentations bring together established perspectives, new works, and diverse views on what photography can achieve. The program is explicitly designed not only for the expert jury: the audience is also invited to participate in the discussion about the works on display.
For Thomas Kellner, therefore, membership means more than just a biographical footnote. It situates his work within an institution whose history is closely linked to the development of artistic photography in Germany. At the same time, it opens up a lasting space for discourse on a photographic practice that, since the 1990s, has consistently explored the possibilities of the analog medium, serial composition, and reconstruction.
Thomas Kellner – A Photographic Position Between Construction and Reconstruction
Thomas Kellner’s photographic work is based on an apparent contradiction: an existing subject is broken down so that a new whole can emerge from its fragments. Deconstruction and reconstruction are not separate stages of his process; they are integral to a way of thinking photographically that begins at the moment of exposure. Each individual negative becomes part of a larger visual structure. Kellner’s work thus follows a principle of fragmentation through which new ways of seeing architecture, society, and perception can emerge.
Analog Photography with 35mm Film
The analog process is fundamental to this visual language. Kellner begins with preparatory drawings in which he divides his subject into rectangular segments. He then photographs with an SLR camera using 35mm film. Each negative measures 24 × 36 millimeters, and each roll contains 36 exposures. Every release of the shutter therefore creates not only a photograph but also a predetermined position within the final image.
After development, the films are cut into strips of equal length and assembled into a large negative from which the contact sheet is made. The sequence of exposures remains intact. Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 2003, Alan G. Artner described this method as a construction calculated frame by frame—and explicitly emphasized that Kellner’s works are not collages.
Fragmentation as an Artistic Principle
For Kellner, fragmentation does not begin when the developed film is cut into strips. It begins with the perception of the subject and its photographic decomposition. This distinction is essential: the individual negatives are not subsequently rearranged like freely interchangeable pieces of a mosaic. Their positions within the work have already been determined during the act of photographing.
This method grew out of Kellner’s early exploration of how a spatial whole could be understood through individual photographic situations. For his 1997 project on the German border, he arrived at the solution of dividing the border into separate situations. When he later turned to the Eiffel Tower, he transferred this principle to an entire roll of film and presented it as a single contact print.
As the number of exposures increases, the represented subject begins to recede behind the structure of the image itself. In his 2003 statement published in Aperture, Kellner observed that the more film he used, the more the building disappeared and the more the viewer began to see the picture itself rather than an image of something.
The “Visual Analytical Synthesis”
Art historian Irina Chmyreva has described Kellner’s method as a “visual analytical synthesis.” The term precisely captures the dual movement within his photography: the subject is analyzed by being broken down into individual views and simultaneously synthesized as these fragments come together to form a new visual coherence.
Alison Nordström approaches the same phenomenon from the perspective of perception. The human eye does not apprehend something as monumental as the Eiffel Tower in a single glance. Instead, the eye moves, gathers details, and combines this information through a cognitive process. Kellner translates this perceptual experience into the structure of the photographic work. Nordström’s observation is particularly revealing: “Kellner’s process is his subject.”
The visible materiality of the contact sheet therefore becomes significant in its own right. Filmstrips, image sequences, and the spaces between frames do not conceal the making of the photograph. They make that process part of the work itself.
Between Architecture, Perception, and Time
Kellner’s architectural works ultimately transform the relationship between photography and time. A conventional photograph fixes a single instant; his contact sheets, by contrast, bring together numerous moments and viewpoints recorded one after another. Nordström sees in this a multi-perspectival conception of space in which the isolated instant is replaced by multiple moments and points of view.
Reinhold Misselbeck formulated the consequence succinctly in 2002: “Thomas Kellner therefore does not photograph architecture, but perceptions of architecture.” The eye moves, collects individual details, and reconstructs a whole from them in memory. Kellner’s photography turns precisely this process into an image.
What emerges, then, is not an image of unstable architecture, but an image of perception in motion. Architecture provides Kellner with his subject matter; his deeper concern lies in seeing itself—and in the question of how fragments, time, and memory become an image.
Thomas Kellner and the History of Photographic Typology
Photographic typologies are based on a fundamental principle: an individual image gains part of its meaning through its relationship to other images. Repetition, comparison, and ordering reveal differences that might remain hidden in an isolated photograph. In the history of German photography, August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher developed this logic in very different ways. Thomas Kellner engages with both positions—not as the follower of a school, but from the perspective of his own photographic method.
The connection is also biographical and regional. Bernd Becher was born in Siegen; August Sander lived and worked for a time in nearby Herdorf. In Kellner’s more recent bodies of work, these historical reference points become starting points for an examination of his own region. The works should not be understood merely as homages to Sander and the Bechers. They also allow Kellner to define his own position between architecture, society, and photographic order.
August Sander and the Photographic Portrait
August Sander’s photographic image of society is an important point of reference for Kellner’s “Facets of the City after August Sander.” What matters here is less the adoption of a historical style than Sander’s fundamental idea that social structures can be made visible through a multitude of individual portraits.
Kellner carries this question into the present. Each portrait remains individual, yet at the same time becomes part of a larger tableau. The exhibition text aptly describes the work as a “visual microcensus of the city”: individuals are selected from the larger social body, made photographically visible, and then reintegrated into a broader visual structure.
This also shifts the relationship between individuality and order. Kellner does not reconstruct a closed system of social classification. Instead, the series uses the tension between individual and community to create a contemporary image of society.
Bernd and Hilla Becher and Photographic Typology
Bernd and Hilla Becher developed their photographic typologies through rigorous comparability. Industrial structures, water towers, blast furnaces, and half-timbered houses were organized by building type and brought together in grids and tableaux. Only through the series do analogies and differences between structures of similar function become visible. Their method has therefore been described as a visual typology based on correspondences of construction and function.
For Kellner, this approach is particularly significant because the Bechers also developed part of their photographic work in the Siegen region. Since 2015, he has photographed half-timbered houses in Eiserfeld that had previously been subjects of their work. His images place the present condition of the buildings in relation to the Bechers’ historical photographs, making modernization, social change, and shifting concepts of domestic life visible.
The relationship is therefore less a continuation of Becher typology than a critical re-examination of its premises across time.
Thomas Kellner – Deconstruction and Reconstruction
It is precisely here that Kellner’s independent position becomes clear. Sander and the Bechers work with photographic systems of order; Kellner adopts the principles of series and comparison, but destabilizes the apparent fixity of such systems. His artistic method is based on breaking apart and recombining, on deconstruction and reconstruction. The exhibition text explicitly connects this process to Cubist image strategies of the early twentieth century and points to Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower paintings as an important starting point for Kellner’s experiments with individual negatives and contact sheets.
This also changes the function of the series. For the Bechers, seriality enables the systematic comparison of separate objects. In Kellner’s work, seriality can already operate within a single image: numerous exposures together form a new visual unity. In Facets of the City, this principle is transferred once again to portraiture. The tableau functions as a coherent structure in which each portrait remains autonomous while simultaneously contributing to a larger social image.
This is where the art-historical connection between Sander, the Bechers, and Kellner becomes especially productive. Sander orders society; the Bechers order architectural forms; Kellner investigates what happens to such systems of order when the photographic image itself is fragmented and reconstructed.
His position should therefore not be described simply as the continuation of a photographic school. Rather, it emerges through a dialogue with different traditions of modernism and German photographic history. In Kellner’s work, typology shifts from a method of classification to a starting point for questions of perception, transformation, and the construction of photographic reality.
Thomas Kellner at the German Photographic Academy
With his appointment to the German Photographic Academy (Deutsche Fotografische Akademie, DFA) in 2026, Thomas Kellner became a member of an institution that has been dedicated to artistic photography for more than a century. The DFA sees itself as a forum for presenting, discussing, and supporting photographic positions. Alongside artistic practice, its activities emphasize theoretical reflection, diverse perspectives, and open professional exchange.
For Kellner, membership in the Academy is part of a broader development shaped both by his sustained investigation of the photographic medium and by decades of international exhibitions and institutional engagement.
Artistic Photography as an Ongoing Dialogue
The conferences of the German Photographic Academy are conceived as forums for this kind of exchange. For its 2026 winter conference in Mannheim, the DFA deliberately assembled a program combining shorter and longer presentations, art-historical contributions, and insights into a range of photographic practices.
Boris Eldagsen had proposed Thomas Kellner as a guest speaker at the DFA conference. On May 2, 2026, Kellner presented his work in a one-hour lecture in Mannheim, discussing three interconnected bodies of work under the title “Pandemic Trilogy: From Bernd and Hilla Becher via the Chapel Schools to August Sander.”
From the outset, therefore, Kellner’s presentation was situated within a dialogical context. Rather than presenting an oeuvre in isolation, the conference provided a framework for discussing different approaches to artistic photography and for placing individual practices in relation to one another.
Membership as Part of Kellner’s Photographic Development
Kellner’s appointment to the DFA was not the beginning of his institutional engagement. His photographic work had already received recognition within important professional contexts. Christoph Schaden and gallerist Burkhard Arnold recommended Thomas Kellner for appointment to the German Society for Photography (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, DGPh), of which he has been a member since 2004.
Over the years, Kellner has also held memberships and positions in artists’ associations, art societies, and museum support organizations. These have included the Kunstverein Siegen, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Siegerländer Künstler, the Friends of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, the Verein der Düsseldorfer Künstler, and several professional and photographic associations.
These activities are more than a sequence of biographical memberships. Taken together, they reveal a continuity between Kellner’s own artistic production, his curatorial activities, professional exchange, and institutional engagement. His appointment to the German Photographic Academy extends this trajectory through participation in another significant forum for the discourse surrounding artistic photography.
International Exhibitions and Institutional Networks
At the same time, Kellner’s work has developed an international presence since the 1990s. Solo exhibitions have been presented at institutions including the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, the Lishui Museum of Photography, the Metenkov House Museum of Photography in Yekaterinburg, and, in 2025, the National Museum of Art of Moldova in Chișinău.
His work has also appeared in international group exhibitions at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C.
This exhibition history is reflected in public collections. Works by Thomas Kellner are held by institutions including the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Boston Athenaeum, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, and the Photography Museum of Lishui.
A substantial part of these museum holdings consists of works from Kellner’s architectural series based on analog contact sheets. These works—in which fragmentation, sequential exposure, time, and reconstruction converge—have played an important role in establishing his photographic position within an international institutional context.
Photographic Positions by Thomas Kellner
Since the early 1990s, Thomas Kellner’s photographic work has developed through distinct bodies of work connected by fundamental questions: How is an image of reality constructed? What roles do time, viewpoint, and movement play in seeing? And how can photography move beyond the assumption that a subject can be captured from a single, privileged point of view?
Kellner’s early experiments with self-built pinhole cameras already reveal his interest in multiple viewpoints and the construction of photographic space. He later transferred this way of thinking to 35mm and medium-format film. Architecture, landscape, and eventually the human figure became different fields of photographic inquiry in which analysis and synthesis, fragmentation and reconstruction, remain closely interconnected.
Dying Nature – Early Experiments with the Pinhole Camera
In Dying Nature, Kellner approaches nature not as an untouched landscape but as a photographically constructed field of perception. Using self-built pinhole cameras with as many as eleven apertures, he creates multiple views within a single photographic structure. These early experiments provide an important foundation for his later exploration of fragmentation, multiple viewpoints, and photographic synthesis.
Germany – View from Inside Out: Photography at the Border
For Germany – View from Inside Out, Kellner traveled approximately 6,000 kilometers along Germany’s national border. Using a pinhole camera, he photographed border crossings and peripheral spaces from unusual perspectives. Hubertus von Amelunxen interpreted these “border passages” as a political survey in which territory, movement, and individual freedom encounter the border as both geographic reality and social construction.
→ Explore Germany – View from Inside Out
Tango Metropolis – Architecture, Time, and Movement
With Tango Metropolis, beginning in 1997, Kellner further developed the photographic language that would become central to the international reception of his work. Architecture is not fragmented afterward; instead, Kellner photographs it frame by frame according to a predetermined structure. The contact sheet becomes the final work: the chronological sequence of negatives remains visible, bringing separate moments of perception together within a dynamic overall view.
In doing so, Kellner also challenges the idea that photography can represent architecture from a single, supposedly objective viewpoint. The building instead emerges through a succession of views—and therefore through time.
Brasília – The Grid of the City and the Grid of Photography
In Brasília, Kellner’s photographic system of organization encounters a city itself shaped by the ordering principles of modernism. Paul Wombell connects Brasília’s urban grid with the grid of film and the contact sheet. Filmstrip, architecture, and urban planning thus become related systems through which space, movement, and time are organized.
Provence – Fragmenting the Landscape
In his landscapes of Provence, Kellner transfers the principle of fragmentation from architecture to the natural environment, working with 120 roll film rather than the 35mm film characteristic of many of his architectural works. This demonstrates that his method is not tied to a particular film format: landscape is analyzed, divided into individual moments of perception, and reconstructed within the complete image.
→ Explore the Provence Landscapes
Timber-Frame Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region Today
With Timber-Frame Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region Today, Kellner turns his attention to his immediate surroundings. In a deliberate engagement with the typological photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, he examines historically evolved vernacular architecture. Each building becomes not only an architectural subject but also evidence of working life, regional history, and social change.
→ Explore Timber-Frame Houses of the Siegen Industrial Region Today
Chapel Schools – Architecture as Social Memory
In the Chapel Schools, Kellner places his engagement with architecture within a social and historical microcosm. The buildings are not merely formal subjects but carriers of regional history and collective memory. In contrast to the international monuments of his earlier work, the scale shifts toward modest architecture whose significance emerges through use, history, and cultural transmission.
Facets of the Metropolis after August Sander
With Facets of the Metropolis after August Sander, Kellner ultimately shifts his investigation from architecture and landscape to people. The point of departure is August Sander’s photographic attempt to make society visible through portraiture. Kellner does not reproduce Sander’s historical system of classification, however, but develops from it a more open model for examining contemporary social diversity.
The individual encounters do not produce a definitive portrait of society. Instead, the people photographed become individual elements within a larger view of urban society that deliberately remains fragmentary. A principle Kellner had previously developed through space and architecture thus reaches another level: the reconstruction of the whole remains dependent on the perception of its individual parts.
Thomas Kellner and the German Photographic Academy
Thomas Kellner’s appointment to the German Photographic Academy (Deutsche Fotografische Akademie, DFA) in 2026 places his work within an institutional context centered on artistic photography and sustained critical dialogue about the medium. It follows more than three decades of photographic practice, international exhibitions, and an ongoing investigation into the conditions of photographic seeing.
This inquiry continues in Kellner’s current projects. He is presently preparing “Facets of the Metropolis after August Sander” for an exhibition in November. At the same time, he is extending his exploration of society and portraiture into an international context: the recently created “Facets of China” will be presented in Beijing in September.
Further exhibitions across Europe are in preparation. In parallel, Kellner is already turning his attention toward future photographic projects—and toward bodies of work whose stories are not yet complete.
Information on the 2026 DFA Conference
German Photographic Academy (Deutsche Fotografische Akademie, DFA) – Mannheim Conference 2026
May 2–3, 2026
MARCHIVUM, Friedrich-Walter-Saal
Archivplatz 1, 68169 Mannheim, Germany
The German Photographic Academy (DFA) held its conference on May 2 and 3, 2026, at the MARCHIVUM in Mannheim. The public program brought together presentations of artistic positions with contributions addressing photographic history, image theory, and contemporary photographic practice.
Guest Lecture by Thomas Kellner
Saturday, May 2, 2026, 3:00–4:00 p.m.
Thomas Kellner:
Pandemic Trilogy: From Bernd and Hilla Becher via the Chapel Schools to August Sander
Thomas Kellner participated in the DFA conference as a guest speaker after Boris Eldagsen had proposed him for the presentation. Following the conference, Kellner was invited by the Presidium of the German Photographic Academy to become a member.
The DFA conference format combines presentations by invited photographers with professional discussion and critical exchange. Following its conferences, an internal committee considers which guest speakers should be invited to join the Academy.
Further information:
2026 DFA Conference in Mannheim
Acknowledgments
Thomas Kellner thanks the Presidium of the German Photographic Academy for the invitation to Mannheim and the DFA members, guests, and fellow speakers for the engaged exchange on artistic photography. Special thanks go to Boris Eldagsen for proposing Kellner as a guest speaker.
From Thomas Kellner’s Studio
New works, exhibitions, projects, and selected insights into Thomas Kellner’s photographic practice—directly from the studio.
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