Andreas Müller-Pohle

Andreas Müller-Pohle (born July 19, 1951, in Braunschweig) is a German photographer, media artist and publisher.

He is considered an important representative of experimental photography and is the originator of the theory of "Visualism".

Andreas Müller-Pohle attended primary schools in Hanover and Kassel during 1958–1962, then 1962–1970, obtained the leaving certificate at Kassel Gymnasium.

He studied law at University of Göttingen from 1970 to 1971, after which he trained as a commercial employee at Continental Gummi-Werke AG, Hanover until 1973.

He initially worked with the moving image, and from the mid-1970s onwards engaged in practical and theoretical approaches to photography, undertaking a project Konstellationen to deal with pictorial syntax.

His first projects from the mid-1970s dealt with questions of image aesthetics and photographic perception, he then turned to - now also with the medium of video - photo recycling and the materiality and immateriality of photography.

Müller-Pohle joined the journal Fotografie as writer and critic from 1971 to 1979, when he took over the Swiss Print Letter in 1980, including it in European Photography, and has been its publisher ever since.

He studied economics and communication science from 1973 to 1974 in Hanover and from 1974 to 1979 in Göttingen.

During this time he was introduced to photography by a friend, and purchased equipment, teaching himself the medium.

His first solo exhibition was in 1978.

Müller-Pohle's interest in "interfaces" leads him in several of his works to completely renounce the classic photographic image and to transform it into other code systems (such as alphanumeric or genetic codes).

As a publisher, especially of the bi-lingual art magazine European Photography, Müller-Pohle has documented and influenced the development of independent photography since the early 1980s.

Müller-Pohle has shown in more than 200 exhibitions, many with published catalogues, and his work has received international attention since the mid-1980s.

Müller-Pohle is represented in public and private collections.

Since 1983 he has published the writings of the media and culture philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose work he has popularised especially in the German speaking countries.

Friend and philosopher Vilém Flusser's first book in English, his own translation, was Towards a Philosophy of Photography published in 1984 by the then new journal European Photography, followed by other media and cultural-philosophical texts in the following years.

Since then, Müller-Pohle has been working with Flusser's oeuvre and archive.

In 1987, together with Volker Rapsch under their imprint Immantrix they published Flusser's essay "Die Schrift" as an early electronic book on diskette.

In the mid-1990s, Müller-Pohle deconstructed digital, genetic and political codes.

One of the first artists to have broken down and translated the analog and the digital codes of images, his series Digital Scores (after Nicéphore Niépce) decodes the photograph by Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras into alphanumeric symbols distributed over eight panels.

As Geoffrey Batchen expressed it: "Fictional nostalgia aside, today's photographic universe is found not in clumps of silver but in the algorithms racing across the surface of German artist Andreas Müller-Pohle's 1995 Digital Scores (after Nicéphore Niépce)...No dots, No silver. No emulsion. No hidden information. In fact, nothing but information"His work The Danube River Project, created in 2005 and 2006, takes up this longstanding preoccupation with interfaces: A "picture atlas" of the Danube is annotated from water samples taken by the artist and inscribed in the photographs.

Müller-Pohle's subsequent project, Hong Kong Waters, takes as subject diverse water landscapes of the Asian metropolis in a photo, video and sound installation.

In 1996 he produced the "Edition Flusser", a ten-volume edition.

Since 1997, he has been guest professor at the Higher Institute for fine Arts, Antwerp, and since, at teaching institutes in Europe, Asia and North and South America.

In 2005, he founded Eye-Mind, an individual workshop initiative in Berlin.

Andreas Müller-Pohle's work spans a variety of topics and concepts in pursuit of a reflective examination of the medium of photography.

Since 2013 Müller-Pohle has undertaken an extensive cycle revealing flows of urban traffic (Studies on Traffic), for which he uses the media of photography, sound and video.

Another work on the topic of water, Kaunas upon the Rivers, was created in 2017 as part of an artist-in-residence.