Arina Dähnick. Fotografie

About

Arina Dähnick Professional Member BFF
BFF Akademie

Arina Dähnick

Arina Dähnick, Daehnick (born 1965) is a photo artist in the fields of architecture I interior design I object design I urban space

She lives and works in Berlin. Having grown up in a creative family, she came into contact with art and photography at an early age. Her first professional exhibition took place when she was only 17 years old. After a long break for personal reasons, she was featured on the Leica Camera Blog in 2014. This was the starting point for a second successful career as a photographer: 2 group exhibitions and 16 solo exhibitions between 2015 and 2021. Her projects Perfect Life, Contemporary Architecture Barcelona and The MIES Project were featured in newspapers and magazines such as Tectonica, Metalocus, The Plan, Photonews, ProfiFoto, LFI International.

The MIES Project was shown in 2019 after a preview exhibition in Berlin at the Atelier André Kirchner, followed by the first exhibition in the US August 2019 at the Farnsworth House Gallery. The images were then presented in Chicago at the Goethe Institut on the occasion of Bauhaus 100, followed by an exhibition during the Chicago Architectural Biennial at S.R. Crown Hall with 60 large formats. The photographs returned to Europe in 2020 where they were shown at the Villa Tugendhat, followed by the Caixa Forum in Barcelona and the Barcelona Pavilion. As of August 2021, the photographs of The MIES Project are back on display in the Guardini Gallery in Berlin on the occasion of the reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie. The accompanying book, with a foreword by Dirk Lohan and an essay by Michelangelo Sabatino, is published by DCV-books. It won the silver medal in the 2019 German Photo Book Award in the category conceptual-artistic. Currently the artist is working on a project about the architecture of Zaha Hadid Exploring ZAHA Hadid as well as a project about the life of people with and in the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Living with MIES.

Doris Hansmann, editor in chief DCV-books, said:
When she visits metropolises the world over a legendary Leica M rangefinder camera (an unusual choice for architecture photography) is forever in her hand. There, the artist follows her photographic intuition, selects the angle and distance, the light mood at different times of days and in different seasons, sets the aperture, exposure and focus manually. She adds nothing to the result and consistently foregoes any post-processing that might manipulate the images. The key themes Arina Dähnick addresses in her pictures are city life and urbanity, reflection and the experience of space, the diametrical opposites of inside and outside, of blurring and acute clarity. Her extraordinary photographic eye penetrates the outer facades in the search for the poetic qualities and mysteries of urban space. With her camera she grasps the soul of the architecture, uses color and lines to create an intimate, sensory experience of the spatial setting. Interlocking image levels initiate a multi-faceted game with reality and generate perspective that straddle outer reality and the imaginative inner eye.

The way I work

Equipped with only one or two rangefinder cameras, I let myself drift, looking for the moment, when the focus switches from external reality to internal vision. I seek out particular times of day and season to get the idea of a building, to feel it, to photograph it …

Images just come to me—or they don’t. When this happens, I follow my photographic intuition that I always can rely on when composing an image. At the same time, I proceed in a very systematic way, by varying exposure time, aperture size, focus, viewing angle and distance. This is extremely important when shooting reflections as the different layers of the subject overlap in the final photo. This is what makes this kind of photographic interaction so sensitive.

With respect to the digital negatives that my camera delivers, I do what I have been doing, ever since I started my photographic career in the 80s (in those days I worked exclusively black/white)—by developing my photos myself. I reject any kind of manipulation or staging that goes beyond simple photo development.

The final photo shows the subject how I captured it in, my reality seen through my photographic eye.

Exhibitions

2022
Farnsworth House Gallery, Plano, Illinois

2021
Guardini Galerie, Berlin
Caixa Forum, Barcelona
Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona
Tugendhat House Brno, Czech Republic

2020
Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona - moved to 2021
Tugendhat House Brno, Czech Republic - moved to 2021

2019
Goethe Institut, Chicago
S.R. Crown Hall IIT Architecture, Chicago
Farnsworth House Gallery Plano, Illinois
Rangefinder Gallery, Chicago
Atelier André Kirchner, Berlin

2018
Leica Gallery Reyer, Salzburg
Magdalenenkapelle, Hannover
Hahnemühle UK presentation at the exhibition in Birmingham
Hahnemühle DE presentation at the exhibition Photokina Cologne

2017
rpiLoccum

2016
Kunst im Turm, Wunstorf
ART+ Galerie Jens Stühmeier, Minden

2015
Info-Galerie at the international Obernkirchen Sculptor Symposium
Kunstscheune, Steinhude
Group exhibition at the German congress for Transactional Analysis, Augsburg

2014
Presentation of the portfolio on the LEICA blog