For her highly acclaimend photographic series “Coexist” Franziska Stünkel has been travelling over the last 12 years with her Leica Camera through Asia, Africa, Europe, America and Australia in search of natural reflections in shop windows, which, in their concentration, tell of the coexistence of human life. Franziska Stünkel’s photographs are exhibited in museums and galleries. They are represented in private and public collections, including the Collection of the Sprengel Museum. The “Audi Art Award” and the “Berlin Hyp Art Award” have been among the distinctions for her works of photography. In 2020 her photo book “Coexist” has been published by the Kehrer Verlag.

In today’s light, these surreal photos of busy metropolises are eerily poignant.

German filmmaker and photographer Franziska Stünkel has built a creative practice around seeing the things people miss. For more than a decade, she’s wandered through cities in Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States (sometimes walking as far as 15 kilometers — over 9 miles — a day) with her Leica camera, waiting for the perfect combination of color, faces and texture to reveal itself in the reflection of a window pane... read more. 

Franziska Stünkel is a photo artist and is quite a storyteller. She travels around the world with her camera looking for still authentic places. Wherever she is, Africa, Asia, Amercia or Europe, she catches fragile motives in the shop window reflections. Stünkel brings two parallel worlds together, sometimes so different that one could hardly imagine that there is only a thin window glass between them. Another paradoxical thing about Franziska Stünkel’s art is her ability to transform highly figurative motives into abstraction. Material objects sometimes lose their materiality in her works and tend to become symbols. Through window reflection, some objects are deprived of their original context and become isolated. There is something very ephemeral in her artwork; colors and structures receive transparency through the reflection and symbolize the fragility of our life.The dimensions and quality of her artwork allow a viewer to enter another reality. No matter on which continent Stünkel creates the image, she manages to depict something very familiar and very estranged at the same time. Her photography is candid photography of life and our surroundings.

Franziska Stünkel’s imagery is not only multi-layered and complex, but worthy of closer examination. The German Leica photographer has spent ten years working on the Coexist series now being presented in Salzburg from October 18 until February 9, 2020. The large-format Diasec prints, show mesmerizing reflections captured while Stünkel was travelling in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. Using her M9, the photographer repeatedly manages to produce surprising imagery that captures the atmosphere of each particular location. The pictures layer colours, shapes and reflections of light caught in the fleeting moments of everyday life, producing photographically recognisable realities. Stünkel avoids any type of digital post-production: she is only interested in authentic moments on the street. Finally however, it is the images seen in their original format that lead the viewer to a truly attractive impression of the world. While reproducing reality, the motifs are also visual, artistic constructions.