Lorenz Kienzle

Lorenz Kienzle (born November 15, 1967] ) is a German photographer.

After a one-year stay in Rome (1990–1991) at the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia, he trained as a photographer at the Berufsfachschule für Fotografie at Lette-Verein in Berlin (1991–1993).

He has been living in Berlin since 1991.

Kienzle spent his childhood and youth in the Bavarian capital Munich.

After graduating in 1993, he started to work as a freelance photographer, focusing on industrial heritage, architecture, urban space and portraiture.

Photographic works by him were published during this time in the German daily newspapers Die Tageszeitung and Die Zeit.

He works with a large format camera and B/W film.

In 1999 Kienzle started to work in the field of documentary photography for museums and other cultural institutions.

In his artistic work since 2002, one focus have been the works by German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane.

In the Tatort Fontane series he dealt with Fontane's novels, for which Kienzle took photographs at original locations from a contemporary perspective.

Since 2006 he has been photographing large sculptures of the American artist Richard Serra in public spaces worldwide.

In 2008, he was commissioned by Serra to photograph the exhibition Promenade at the Grand Palais in Paris for Monumenta 2008 as well as the installation piece Promenade for the exhibition catalogue and other advertising media such as posters and press photos.

In an interview with the magazine Berliner Woche in the context of the exhibition Mein erstes gutes Foto (My first good photo) at Berlin Brotfabrik gallery in 2015 he talked about the first photo he magnified by himself while still at school in the 1980s: "In art lessons at my school, I had only spent a single hour in the darkroom. I still remember how the teacher rushed me to quickly move the photo paper from bath to bath".

The first results of this research can be found in the publication of the Swedish festival O/Modernt The Art of Borrowing: Or How One Thing Leads to Another (2016).

Photographs by Lorenz Kienzle can be found in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the German Museum of Technology in Berlin, the Brandenburg Museum of Industry, and in numerous private collections.

In 2016 the Stadtmuseum Berlin purchased his picture series Tatort Fontane.

Through an exhibition project with archived photographs by Heinz Krüger, who was well known in the GDR, his focus since 2017 has also been on Fontane's Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.

The short documentary portrait about Lorenz Kienzle had its premiere at the opening of the exhibition One Year Home at Käthe Kollwitz Museum (Berlin) on February 26, 2017.

Since 2017, Kienzle reviewed and digitized the photo archive of Müllrose photographer Ursula Raschke, resulting in an online exhibition project in 2020 and in the urban space of Müllrose on his initiative.

As part of Kulturland Brandenburg's theme year in 2021: Future of the Past – Industrial Culture on the Move, Kienzle showed a first time retrospective of his work on industrial culture, spanning a work period of three decades, at the Senftenberg Fortress and Museumsfabrik Pritzwalk titled Brandenburg Industrial Landscapes 1992–2021.

For 2024 he received a Villa Aurora grant for the project Döblin in Exile.

The series was supplemented in 2019 with current works on a total of 11 novels, and shown in the exhibition Fontanes Berlin at Märkisches Museum.

The results of numerous photographic excursions into the Berlin area on bicycle have been included in the book Brandenburger Notizen : Fontane - Krüger - Kienzle, published in March 2019, and an exhibition in the Museum Falkensee as part of Fontane.200, a program series funded by the annual culture festival ″Kulturland Brandenburg″.

Further literary research deals with the work of Alfred Döblin.

Here, too, Kienzle seeks out original locations for the novels, especially in Berlin.

It was shown as part of the culture festival Fontane.200 in September 2019, together with original manuscripts of Fontane novels and views of Berlin from Fontane's time in the exhibition ''Fontanes Berlin – Photographs & Writings.

Fiction & Reality''.

The Syrian filmmaker Omar Akahare followed Kienzle with a video camera during his work on the portrait series Ein Jahr Heimat (One Year Home).