About...

In fall 2006, my scientific career as a cell biologist brought me from Munich to Potsdam near Berlin. Photography has escorted me through my whole adulthood. Yet, it was my move to Potsdam that triggered a more intensive involvement with photography, since here I found friends in the local photo club who gave me a great creative environment to spend a considerable part of my spare time for my creative talents that I have to neglect at my daily work. Together with eleven of my friends I am organizing the "Fotogalerie Potsdam e.V.", a successful gallery project to promote contemporary artistic photography. With my photos I want to stimulate the imagination of the viewer and to tell a story that emotionally touches him, since sensing emotions is the prerequisite to keep pictures sticking in the viewer's mind. I prefer available light and clearly composed pictures with a discreetly arranged motive. I like working with a series concept in mind that makes the photos more suitable for exhibitions and photo books. My photos are taken with digital cameras or analog medium format cameras with a wide range of lenses ranging from extreme wide-angle to telephoto lenses, and often a tripod. Yet, to me the type of camera used to take the picture is rather unimportant. It is difficult to state names of other artists, who have inspired me, since there are many. In principle I could get inspirations by any picture I'm watching. I'm trying not not copy somebody elses style but to find and create an own one. Among my favorite photographers are Gregory Crewdson, Nadav Kander, Andreas Gursky, Wim Wenders, and Peter Bialobrzeski, just to name a few. Since 2008 I've presented my photographic projects in thirty well-acclaimed exhibitions in Berlin, Brandenburg/H., Potsdam, Munich, Frankfurt/M., Neubrandenburg, Lisboa, Milano and Gorzów Wielkopolski. At the 4th "Kunstallee Potsdam" (an arts fair) in 2011, I won the Arts Prize for my series "The Traveller" in an election of the approximately 4000 visitors. Several photos won prizes or were shortlisted in national and international photo contests, such as the Sony World Photography Award, where I won the travel category and the Germany National Award in 2017 or the Siena "Creative Photo Award" where I won the Pangea award (1st prize) in the "conceptual" category in 2020.

Photo by Guido Stoll