Kathrin Linkersdorff: Works gathers the Berlin artist’s large-format images in which plants and bacteria serve as points of departure rather than subjects to be documented. Each photograph is a staged record of organic decay, composed with the patience of a still-life painter and the curiosity of a laboratory observer. Underlying the series is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in which beauty is bound up with imperfection, incompleteness and transience; Linkersdorff lets that idea shape both what she photographs and how long she allows a form to hold before it changes.
The volume is edited by Ingo Taubhorn, who also contributes a text and a conversation with Brigitte Woischnik; essays by Regine Hengge, a microbiologist, and the art historian Karin Leonhard set the work against scientific and art-historical questions. The book brings together works from the previously unpublished Re-Naissance, Wabi-Sabi and Floriscences series, alongside newer Fairies pictures and early results of Microverse, an experimental project made in collaboration with Hengge and the Institute of Microbiology at Humboldt University Berlin. Reading across these groups shows how consistently Linkersdorff has pursued the same problem: how to give a fleeting organic state a form that outlasts it.
The 192-page book is published in German and English by Hartmann Books, with Detlev Pusch’s design extending the argument into the object itself: a thread-knotted binding in a six-part cover printed on 600-gram recycled cardboard, lettered in foil. The format suits images whose colour and structure reward close looking, and the combination of unpublished sequences and an ongoing collaboration gives this survey a documentary value beyond a single exhibition.
