Jochen Lempert

Since the early 1990s Jochen Lempert (born 1958; lives in Hamburg) has produced a growing body of work comprised of nature and animal photographs which he is continually reorganising and expanding in his exhibitions and books. His photographs look at the way in which living systems manifest themselves from a scientific perspective, their arrangements and their autopoiesis. These are phenomena with which Lempert, as a trained biologist, is familiar and conversant, perceiving them everywhere and capturing them in his photographs. Indeed, his photographs of human, animal, plant and micro-organic life forms operate at the threshold of science photography – and yet they unfold a poetic depth attributable solely to his self-perception as a visual artist. And so his oeuvre is also about a considerable degree of autonomy. It is certainly indebted to a ‘scrutinising vision’, but has no need to be subservient to a higher order with which ‘results’ are replicated. The enjoyment to be had (or the knowledge that it is possible) to open up different contexts of perception is simply too great.