Lia Darjes is a German photographer, born in Berlin in 1984 and raised in Hamburg, whose practice moves between still life, documentary observation, and staged-looking encounter. Based between Hamburg and Berlin, she has described an early commitment to photography: she made a darkroom in her parents’ basement at fourteen. Her pictures bring an attentiveness to ordinary, often overlooked situations rather than treating the still life as a purely studio-bound genre.

Darjes’s visual language draws on the compositional legacy of Dutch Golden Age painting while remaining rooted in contemporary urban observation. Vivid colour, carefully distributed light, and the charged arrangement of food, surfaces, and found remnants can make an apparently casual scene feel theatrical. This is not simply quotation of historical painting: the reference gives everyday materials and chance visitors a formal gravity. Her work is distinctive in the way it lets documentary contingency and pictorial construction coexist, leaving viewers to consider whether a scene has been arranged or discovered.

Her 2024 book Plates I–XXXI, published by Chose Commune, is the key documented project in this context. The series concerns enigmatic guests at a banquet: timid creatures appear among the remains and settings of a meal. Its title frames the photographs as a sequence of plates, suggesting both a dining table and the reproductive, book-based life of images. Accounts of the work emphasize its silent, richly coloured character and its dialogue with Dutch masters. Rather than offering conventional wildlife photography, the project uses animals’ furtive presence to turn domestic leftovers and shared spaces into an odd social theatre.

Darjes was selected as a FUTURES talent in 2019 through the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, and Magnum Photos later presented an Artist Spotlight devoted to Plates I–XXXI. These contexts position her within a European photographic field interested in expanded documentary approaches and the renewed possibilities of the photobook. For collectors, Plates I–XXXI is a useful entry point because the project’s meaning depends on serial viewing: individual images hold their own as still lifes, while the succession develops a more unsettled narrative of appetite, absence, and animal presence. The Chose Commune publication is therefore significant not only as a record of the photographs but as the project’s explicitly named book form.

Lia Darjes was born in Berlin in 1984 and lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin. She studied at HAW Hamburg in Ute Mahler’s class. Darjes became known for Tempora Morte, a documentary still-life study of small unofficial street-market stalls in Kaliningrad; the publisher identifies that project as the subject of her first monograph. Since 2018 she has taught photography at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. Since 2023, she has run the institution with photographer Jörg Brüggemann. Chose Commune states that Galerie Robert Morat has represented her since 2019.

Lia Darjes is presented by Robert Morat Galerie as an artist whose practice investigates the limits of documentary photography and the viewer’s experience of an image. The gallery identifies Tempora Morte as the series through which she became known: using a large-format camera and flash, she photographed modest goods offered by older vendors at roadside markets in Kaliningrad as visually abundant still lifes. Its selected CV records exhibitions in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as a 2017 Lotto-Foundation Young Talent Artprize and the 2024 Chose Commune publication Plates I–XXXI.