Albrecht Kunkel: QUEST

The photographer Albrecht Kunkel (1968–2009) was a seeker who consistently addressed the elemental questions of human existence in his work. His choice of subjects traces a sweeping arc from the sites of the earliest known cave and rock art to the contemporary deluge of multimedia images. With their focus on landscapes and spaces of particular cultural, social, or religious significance, his photographs are an investigation of arcane cultural practices and behaviors. Early and primitive forms of civilization and culture are contrasted with their present-day manifestations and interrogated as to the universal – or changing – principles behind them. Kunkel’s photographic project, an attempt to locate culture through his own images as well as those of others, reveals him as an artist who was acutely conscious of the paradigms of his medium, and who explored its constraints and possibilities in the digital realm as well. Combining an overview of Kunkel’s major bodies of work with essays by Jana Duda, Erec Gellautz, Ursula Frohne and Christian Katti, as well as Mirjam Lewandowsky, this book is an indepth look at the twenty-year career of an artist whose work not only takes viewers to important sites of collective memory but also compels them to consider the way pictures construct history and reality.