Andreas Müller-Pohle

Andreas Müller-Pohle, born in 1951, has been shaping and reflecting on photography and media art as an artist, theorist, and publisher since the late 1970s. He is the founder and editor of »European Photography«, an international art magazine for contemporary photography, and the publisher of the key writings of cultural and media philosopher Vilém Flusser, now available in the ten-volume »Edition Flusser«, including the “Philosophy of Photography”, written at his suggestion. With the publication of Flusser’s »Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?« (Does Writing Have a Future?) on floppy disc in 1986, he was one of the pioneers of today’s e-book. Müller-Pohle is the author of programmatic contributions to the theory of photography, for example on Visualism and on media strategies in the digital age and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at institutions in Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

Müller-Pohle’s work has been shown in over 200 solo and group exhibitions worldwide. While his early photographs, particularly the »Transformance« project, focused on issues of visual perception and the photographic process, he turned to deconstructing and recycling images in his subsequent »Dacapo« and »Cyclograms« series, as well as in his »Entropia« video. In the mid-1990s, he began to explore the use of digital, genetic, and political codes, for example in »Digital Scores« (1995) and »Blind Genes« (2002), followed by long-term projects on the theme of water (»Studies on Water«), including extensive portraits of the Danube and the metropolis of Hong Kong, and the investigation of mobility phenomena in various regions of the world (»Studies on Traffic«). Müller-Pohle’s work does not follow a linear pattern, but encompasses a wide variety of subjects, media, and methods. Often his projects remain in the draft stage and are now being made available to the archive as concept studies.

The »Andreas Müller-Pohle« archive will be donated to the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe as a premortem bequest. It comprises correspondence, manuscripts, sketches, and materials from Müller-Pohle’s work as an artist and publicist, supplemented by documents from his more than forty years as editor of the magazine »European Photography«, as well as text and image testimonies from his close collaboration with Vilém Flusser, which lasted for more than a decade. The transfer of the archive is accompanied by a major acquisition of around 300 works. In addition to a collection of Müller-Pohle’s early analogue photographs, it includes important digital works and the majority of his videos made since the 1990s.