Photographer and Visual Artist
Renate Graf devoted herself to photography through her deep connection with literature and poetry, using images to document the visions that emerge during her readings. Her camera has accompanied her travels across countries such as South India, Morocco, China, Alaska, Russia, Yemen, Cambodia, Italy, Germany, Austria, and France. She also created exclusive photographic works in the studio of Anselm Kiefer, with whom she shared many years of her life. Her work is strongly inspired by writers and poets including Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot, as well as filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Visconti, and Tarkovsky. Renate Graf describes herself as “not a photographer in the classical sense,” explaining that her images are not meant to seek technical perfection, but rather function as a language and testimony of what she sees. She mainly works with film photography and black-and-white prints. Beginning with handmade travel notebooks combining photographs and literary texts, her artistic process later evolved into larger handcrafted books and darkroom-developed prints using traditional techniques. In 2019, her first solo exhibition in Portugal, The Photographer’s Chronicles: Thoughts Become Images 1992–2019, presented around 180 works documenting two decades of travel and artistic exploration.
