Documentary in Flux
“C/O Berlin’s twenty-fifth birthday offers the perfect moment to look back on almost two decades of the C/O Berlin Talent Award. Since its founding in 2000, C/O Berlin has worked to support emerging talents in art and academia, offering them a platform for considering photography in the broadest sense. The C/O Berlin Talent Award was established in 2006 and remains a firm fixture in our program. Then as now, it is a unique annual prize for artists and theorists. Over the past twenty years, it has been awarded to over ninety such individuals, with 47 pairs in both disciplines.”
—Veronika Epple . Junior Curator . C/O Berlin Foundation
At the start, the prize was awarded following an application process with a set theme. More recently, an international pool of experts was drawn on to make nominations with jury members hailing from photography and book publishing. New Documentary Strategies has been the thematic focus since 2020. Carefully designed individual photobooks accompanying the exhibitions have been published in cooperation with Spector Books since 2018. Forty-seven have been published as of 2025. Each one includes an interview and an essay that offers a theoretical perspective on the artistic work. Installed on a book display wall, these publications play a central role in the exhibition.
This exhibition showcases fourteen selected artists, offering a new perspective on their work, which demonstrates the broad array of approaches taken to documentary work. In this, these works also reflect the societal questions, conversations, and aesthetic of their day. This is why the exhibition has been organized into four thematic sections rather than taking a chronological approach. A selection of winning theorists and artists have taken the exhibition as an opportunity to once again reflect on their aims at the time in thoughts shared as short text contributions.
The first section focuses on the traditional genres of documentary photography: reportage, landscapes, and portraits. Works on show are by Friederike Brandenburg (2010), whose landscape photographs document traces of human presence in Norway’s natural world; Sibylle Fendt (2006), who took portraits of individuals with hoarding disorders in their homes, and Janina Wick (2008), whose portraits capture the fragile moment between childhood and burgeoning adulthood.
Works by two artists offer a bridge to the second section, focused on staging within documentary photography. Works by Tobias Zielony (2007) show young people living on the fringes of an affluent society and its societal acceptance, while works by Pepa Hristova (2008) present Muslim individuals who are in the minority in Bulgaria.
The further works invite the viewer to consider the linearity of documentary narrative strategies and how one might play with a documentary aesthetic. Florian van Roekel (2012) spent many months photographing his colleagues in a Dutch office, until they forgot about the camera and allowed him to take photographs of them daydreaming. In her photographs, Karolina Wojtas (2022) breaks all the rules of photography, using an unusual collage-like arrangement of images to think critically about Poland’s authoritarian school system. Emanuel Mathias (2015) makes use of found archival images document GDR history at Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig.
The third section expands the media on display, with a focus on moving images and room-sized installations. Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (2019) shows an atmospheric twelve-hour video work capturing young people at the Victory Arch in Madrid; Anna Ehrenstein (2020) plays with a futurist image world using a variety of media and materials to question global power dynamics; Adji Dieye (2021) works with archival images on silk in order to break apart colonial narratives; and Sasha Kurmaz (2016) sites his documentary practice in public space, incorporating actionist elements.
The final section points to the future. The question of the extent to which documentary photography can depict reality is more topical than ever given the omnipresent flood of fleeting digital images, AI, and fake news. Willem Popelier (2012) investigates the staging of political communication while overlapping excerpts from former US president Obama’s weekly addresses over his eight years in office. Ivonne Thein (2008) digitally manipulates images to think about the pro-ana movement and the harmful desire for extreme thinness; she also shows a new installation which uses AI to display deformed hands.
Documentary in Flux . Revisiting the C/O Berlin Talent Award is C/O Berlin’s first comprehensive exhibition to look solely at the C/O Berlin Talent Award as well as the many strands and strategies of documentary work.
Since 2020, the C/O Berlin Talent Award has been made possible by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung. In summer 2026, the exhibition will also be shown in the BlackBox of the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung in Munich.
