The European Month of Photography is Germany’s leading festival in the medium; it highlights Berlin as a city of photography on both the national and international stage. EMOP Berlin brings together the extraordinary concentration of museums, exhibition venues, galleries, project spaces, archives, universities and art academies, and independent initiatives in Berlin working with photography to create a shared festival space. We view EMOP Berlin as a platform, a sounding board, and a driving force for the artistic, theoretical, and institutional development of photographic image practices.
The festival derives its unique significance from its location. Berlin is a city where the wide range of ways in which photography is implemented socially and artistically is especially palpable. Here, the history of the medium is not a closed chapter; instead, its historicity remains visible—as a mutable, contested, and productive history (including the division between and reunification of East and West Germany) in which documentary, artistic, journalistic, activist, private, and institutional practices coexist, respond to one another, and evolve through mutual exchange—thereby carrying on the writing and rewriting of the medium’s history. As a festival team, we seek to make this plurality of voices tangible. Through our own curated program—particularly during the EMOP Opening Days—as well as through the extensive discursive and educational programs offered throughout the festival month, we create opportunities for productive engagement, mutual learning, and collective reflection.
EMOP Berlin addresses photography in all its contemporary breadth: as an artistic medium, a social image-making practice, a technological dispositif or apparatus, an archive, a material, and especially—together with our approximately one hundred partner institutions across the city—as an exhibition format. EMOP Berlin occupies a particularly important position precisely because artistic photography had to struggle for so long to achieve institutional recognition as a visual art form. We highlight the spaces the medium has successfully claimed for itself, and aim to contribute to strengthening these spaces in a sustainable way.
At the same time, Berlin is a place where a wide spectrum of photographic communities from Germany and around the world converge. Local and international perspectives converge here, as do institutional and independent modes of practice. This concentration gives rise to an artistic community that is not homogeneous, but instead draws its distinctive energy from difference, exchange, and mutual reference.
Artists, curators, galleries, institutions, project spaces, publishers, collectors, theorists, and a broad public are the key players in the EMOP Berlin festival. Together, we create spaces for networking, exchange, and collective professional development. In doing so, we connect a thematic engagement with photography-based art to the structural consolidation of a unique photography scene—making EMOP Berlin a festival of national prominence and international relevance.
The EMOP Berlin Team