Né en 1961 en Allemagne.
Vit et travaille à Berlin.
1981 ‘Abitur’ (final secondary school examinations)
1983 3 year training as photographer for the steel industry Duisburg
1986 studies in communication design specializing in photography at University Essen under Prof. Inge Osswald
1989 studies in photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (HGB - Academy of Visual Arts)
1991 Master of Arts degree in photography at HGB Leipzig
1993 graduated as ‘Meisterschüler’ (post graduate master student) at HGB Leipzig
1994 founded the mambo 36 writers’ and artists' group and gallery in Berlin Kreuzberg
1995 became a member of ‘Ostkreuz’ – the photographers’ agency’, Berlin worked as a photographer for international magazines and publications like stern, Geo, New York Times Magazine, Neue Zürcher Zeitung etc.
1998 stopped working as a photo-journalist under commission and therefore left the ‘Ostkreuz’ Agency, co-edited the photo book „Östlich von Eden. Von der DDR nach Deutschland“ ( East of Eden.From the GDR to Germany) Gold Medal for the best photo book in Germany in 1989
2000 Founder of the Fotografie am Schiffbauerdamm - fas-, an open exhibition space and cultural platform for photography in Berlin
Researched the life and photography of YVA, a Jewish female photographer and teacher of Helmut Newton. She lived in Berlin in the 1930s. Archive research in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Curated the „fas - Postfuhramt Berlin“ exhibition space with 9 exhibitions.
2001 founding director of the fas.akademie private school of photography in Berlin, together with Professor Manfred Schmalriede and Professor Arno Fischer.
2001 founding director of the fas.akademie private school of photography in Berlin, together with Professor Manfred Schmalriede and Professor Arno Fischer.
Director and lecturer at the school until 2007
2008 worked in South Africa on a book South African Coast marebuch verlag Hamburg, published September 2008,
held workshops in Lisbon, lectured at the Zurich University of the Arts
2009 photographic work on a project called Aftermath
2011 Book release of AFTERMATH. Published at Hatje Cantz Ostfildern
Lives in Berlin and Cape Town
Jörn Vanhöfen takes photos on the crisis: harbingers of a post-industrial age. The first works in the Disturbia series arose in the Northern states of the USA in Detroit and the surrounding area between 2008 and 2012. Others, taken in Egypt and India, for example, will follow. After the success of his series and book, Aftermath, Jörn Vanhöfen experimented, in his new series, with the classical photographic moment of the instant and a serial succession of pictures. With this conceptual approach, he is going beyond his previous works, which were very much geared to the individual picture. His latest works adopt a distinctly cinematic approach: an overall situation is accompanied by successive single images taken from different angles, in which each shot adds a further fragment to the scene. If we exa...
Only a few individuals appear in the quiet pictures by photographer Jörn Vanhöfen, or so it seems, at first glance. For behind the aesthetic charm of his visual compositions lies the ambiguity of their aesthetic, as well as the omnipresence of people in the age of globalization.
His landscapes are places man has affected, and then carelessly abandoned, forgotten, but they also depict places of transformation, such as the wildfires in Portugal, droughts, or marble mining in Carrera. With his leftovers, man has created landscapes that ravage, pollute, and supplant: mountains of junk, paper, and old tires; industrial ruins and deserted terrain in mega-metropolises. Vanhöfen creates unique, poetic photographs, which disturb us and question our experience of reality, because they avoid definition. ...
Ses splendides photographies portent une interrogation sur l'identité, l'être au pays, la « Heimat ». C'est l'Elbe qui l'inspire.
Il est le successeur d' Arno Fischer à la tête de l'Ecole et Galerie
« Fotografie am Schiffbauerdamm » (F.A.S., fondée en 2000).
Annonce du festival sur Actuphoto :http://www.actuphoto.com/page.php?page=pronews/news_complete&id=2069
© Jörn Vanhöfen...