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Michael Gessner

Photographer
Berlin

«In many of my works, spaces that have been designed by humans play a crucial role.»

Please, introduce yourself and your work…

My name is Michael Gessner. Currently I live in Berlin and work as a photographer. Before I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in communication and information design in Würzburg, I had served my apprenticeship as a carpenter and worked in this profession for about two years. Even though, in the meantime, I have made photography the center of my professional life, I do still work as a carpenter from time to time. Which has now developed into a good balance between digital and analogue work.

Portrait Michael Gessner

How did you find your way into the field of architecture and photography?

The starting point was skateboarding. As teenagers, me and my friends went skating almost every day, filming new tricks. We produced short skate films, using the most basic video editing software, and saved them on our hard drives, long before YouTube and Instagram started to become a thing. This process, combined with an interest in technology, eventually led me to explore other areas of creative representation, such as photography.

At the same time, skateboarders share a special view of architecture. Steps, handrails, stone and metal edges come into focus and the urban space becomes a large playground, so to speak. And this is what still intrigues me about skate videos to this day: to go beyond the task of making a trick look as cool or impressive as possible, and to also include architecture in the picture.

What comes to your mind, when you think about your time at university?

Above all, I think of it as a time of “constant reorientation”. The communication design (BA) and information design (MA) degree programme opened up countless opportunities for creative exploration of diverse topics, which seemed somewhat overwhelming at first. Without having a clear point of focus, my interest in illustration, typography and photography each started to develop equally in the beginning. It was not until the fifth semester that I started to focus (strictly) on photography. So it was only in this late phase of my studies that the prospect of freelance work came up.

How is your work connected with and to architecture/space?

In many of my works, spaces that have been designed by humans play a crucial role, even though these spaces function as stages rather than actors. In my Bachelor’s thesis, for example, I focused on artificial habitats in the form of zoo enclosures and investigated the question as to whether people perceive the reproduction of nature has the same effect on people as supposedly “untouche” nature in similar ways. Even though it is doubtful whether such a thing as “untouched nature” actually exists, given that virtually every spot on this planet is shaped by human influence in some form.

In my Master’s, I dealt with surveillance practices conducted by ourselves, the state and by companies. In this work, too, spaces play a key role. We move through it and are filmed, tracked and algorithms calculate where we are likely to move next.