Arina Dähnick, a photo artist active in the fields of fine arts and architecture, lives and works in Berlin. Having grown up in a creative family, she came into contact with art and photography at an early age.

She had her first professional photo exhibition when only 17. When, in 1986, Arina Dähnick resolved not to have to live from her art, this sparked a long pause in her output. The presentation of her work at the Leica Camera Blog 2014 was followed by countless exhibitions as well as publications in newspapers and magazines. She made a name for herself inside and outside Germany and gained a firm place in the international photography scene with her series Perfect Life, Contemporary Architecture Barcelona and The MIES Project.

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.

by Doris Hansmann, editor in chief DCV-books