During the 2025 Photoszene Festival, the photo book quartet came together in the temporary Photo Pavilion, and this time Frank Dürrach and Damian Zimmermann invited former Deichtorhallen curator Ingo Taubhorn and Folkwang professor Elisabeth Neudörfl as guests.
The second book, “Test” by Laura Bielau, has no text whatsoever and brings together her own photographs, taken in research institutions for behavioral biology, plant genetics, and viral diseases, with depictions of living beings and habitats in literature, advertising, computer games, and political propaganda. It is a visual journey into the ambivalent relationship between humans and animals and an investigation of the shared needs of humans and animals.
Fotobuch-Quartett
Based on the "Literary Quartet", Damian Zimmermann and Nadine Preiß (both Photoszene), Markus Schaden and Frederic Lezmi (The PhotoBookMuseum), Wolfgang Zurborn (Lichtblick School), Oliver Rausch and Frank Dürrach (both Fotoakademie-Koeln) as well as a changing guest discuss four photo books live and in front of an audience, sometimes lovingly and benevolently, sometimes meanly and maliciously, their heads hot. The events will be recorded by FotoTV and then put online. The Photobook Quartet is a format of the Internationale Photoszene Köln. The first event took place within the framework of the Photoscene Festival 2014 at the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (MAKK), followed by the Photobook Quartet+ as a guest in the art spaces of the Michael Horbach Foundation, the Forum for Photography, the Zephyr in Mannheim and during the Cologne Art Book Fair 2015. Guests of previous editions were Renate Gruber, Claudia Dichter, Alexa Becker, Katja Stuke, Thekla Ehling, Erik Kessels, Bettina Flitner, Dr. Anja Schürmann, David Klammer, Simone Klein, and Thomas Gust.