Stages gathers recent work by the Berlin photographer Anna Lehmann-Brauns, whose images have long invited the word “painterly” without asking for it ironically. She photographs the Bosphorus seen from a ferry window in Istanbul, the interiors of Berlin pubs, gay clubs in San Francisco, the dust-filmed shopwindows of Charlottenburg junk shops, and rooms she builds herself as scale models. Across these disparate subjects a common atmosphere holds: enigmatic, quietly theatrical, and prone to recall the compositions of paintings the viewer half remembers. Some pictures carry wistfulness and melancholy; others, in bright colour, register as cool and exact.
The title works on two levels. These are stages in the literal sense—settings where ordinary life is framed and performed—and stages in the sense of phases, the intervals of a working life. Both readings matter to how the sequences are built. The book is the photographer’s fourth individual publication, and it draws together several series of previously unpublished work made in recent years, presenting them as evidence of a concentrated period of production rather than a retrospective survey.
The volume is designed by Heimann + Schwantes in Berlin and published by Hartmann Books in a German/English edition, with texts by Barbara Esch Marowski and Matthias Harder. One hundred and twenty pages carry roughly seventy-five illustrations; the book appears in hardcover at 28 × 32.5 cm. The generous trim gives the interior studies and model rooms room to breathe, and the bilingual apparatus keeps the photographic argument legible to readers working in either language.
For collectors, the case rests on the work itself and on its framing. Lehmann-Brauns has built a sustained body of colour photography that treats constructed and found space with equal seriousness, and this book assembles series from a defined creative phase that had not previously appeared in print. The pairing of the two essayists situates that phase within a longer conversation about photography and painting, while the design treats the sequences as sequences. It is a book to read slowly, image by image.
