Les Euronautes

Stéphane Couturier, Camilla Douraghy, Ralf Peters, Benyamin Reich

The exhibition presents four photographers who have embarked on a search for Europe’s intrinsic nature. None of them explicitly addresses Europe, yet the question of a possible European identity can be perceived in all of their works.
In the formally impressive images of Stéphane Couturier, who photographed the collection of antique sculptures in the Gläsernes Depot of the Dresden Albertinum, the antique ideal of the naked human body is evident, as it is in Camilla Douraghy’s photographs of nudes.
The series Different Persons by Ralf Peters inquires into people’s individuality; although unrelated to one other, the typical Northern European faces of those portrayed resemble one another to an astonishing degree – an effect further enhanced by his use of the ‘passport photo’ concept. The works of Benyamin Reich, an Israeli of European heritage, show how Jewish traditions live on in Europe while also transmitting an outsider’s perspective of Europe as the continent of forests and swamps, of snow and rivers.