Press

The deadline for submitting photographs to the Open Call Re:Touch. Expanded Surfaces in Smartphone Photography is on the 6 March 2023 at 23:59 CET. It takes place on the occasion of EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography 2023 and in cooperation with Kulturprojekte Berlin. With this open call under the theme Re:Touch, we offer amateur and professional photographers the opportunity to engage critically or artistically with digital smartphone photography, the process of digital image processing and its effects on society and (virtual) realities. There is a prize money of €1,500 for the first winner, €700 for the second winner and €300 for third winner. The complete call as well as all terms and conditions can be found on the website re-touch-photocontest.com.

Our Jury Members

Shortly after the publication of the Re:Touch Open Call, the jury for the contest has been selected. We are pleased to present five renowned personalities from the culture and art scene as our jury members.

Anna Ehrenstein lives between Berlin, Tirana and the cloud and works in various mediums in artistic or curatorial production, examining how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations. Anna Ehrenstein studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial courses in Valetta, ML and Lagos, NG. In 2022 she received the INITIAL scholarship for artistic mediation, in 2021 the Research Scholarship of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin and in 2020 the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2020 for “New Documentary Strategies” with her work Tools for Conviviality. (https://annaehrenstein.com/)

Lotte Reimann (🌵 *she/her) is an artist, researcher and teacher, based in Berlin. She works on conceptual photographic narratives about corporeality that subvert the colonial historical concept of the fetish—the view on the “others”. Lotte received the Krupp award “Contemporary German Photography” in 2022, the C.o.C.A. Foundation Art Prize in 2016 and was a Jan van Eyck Academie fellow in Maastricht in 2019. (https://www.lottereimann.de/)

Wolfgang Ullrich, born in 1967, lives as a cultural scientist and freelance author in Leipzig. From 2006 to 2015 he was a professor of art science and media theory at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe. His main research and publication topics involve the history and critique of the concept of art, sociological image phenomena and consumer theory. Since 2019 he is a co-editor of the book series “Digitale Bildkulturen“. Other recent book publications include: “Selfies. Die Rückkehr des öffentlichen Lebens”, Berlin 2019, “Feindbild werden. Ein Bericht”, Berlin 2020 and “Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie”, Berlin 2022 (www.ideenfreiheit.de)

Roc Herms shows his passion in Internet, video games and parallel realities, and the need to take a step further in photographic practices. “Postcards From Home” and “<YO> <YO> <YO>”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited at Les rencontres d’Arles (France), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), CCCB (Barcelona) among others. (https://www.rocherms.com/)

Sarah Straßmann is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. In addition, she has been teaching as a research associate for Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Hildesheim since 2019. Her works have been exhibited internationally, most recently in 2022 in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn or in the Ruhr Museum Essen. She currently receives the scholarship for “Photography and Media Art 2023” from the state of Kärnten/ Austria. One focus of her works is on intermedial, photography-based research projects that deal with the use of smartphone photography in the context of the internet and social media. (sarah-strassmann-fotografie.de)

This is a project of the Seminar of Culture and Media Management at Freie Universität Berlin with the support of Kulturprojekte Berlin.