Photography has never been merely the act of pressing a shutter. It is a medium through which artists project systems of seeing, memory, and perception. Returning to the Shanghai Exhibition Centre this May, the 11th edition of PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai brought together more than fifty galleries and institutions from China and abroad, presenting image-based practices that move fluidly between photography, installation, digital media, and conceptual art.

Across photography’s two-hundred-year history, each technological shift has transformed not only how images are produced, but how reality itself is constructed. From film to digital imaging, from the “decisive moment” to staged tableaux, from documentary photography to AI-generated imagery, photography has long exceeded its original documentary function. It has become a philosophical and aesthetic language through which artists negotiate truth, fiction, memory, and mediation.

One of the most influential movements in this transformation was the Düsseldorf School. The fair’s central exhibition, art <=> photography, traces fifty years of the school’s evolution, opening with monumental large-format works before expanding into the media experiments of younger generations. Together, these works reveal how the Düsseldorf School continues to shape contemporary image culture while constantly revising its own visual grammar.

The Düsseldorf School at PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai

The Düsseldorf School, long associated with the legacy of German “New Objectivity,” emerged in the 1970s around the influential duo Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher. Through their systematic documentation of industrial architecture—water towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, and factories—the Bechers created a typological archive of disappearing industrial civilization.

Among their most renowned students were Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth. Though all inherited the Bechers’ typological discipline, each developed a radically distinct visual language.

Gursky, whose Rhein II once set the auction record for a photographic work, is known for constructing monumental images through large-format photography and digital recomposition. His vast landscapes of global capitalism—factories, stock exchanges, warehouses, crowds—unfold from an elevated, almost omniscient perspective in which the individual dissolves into systems of production and consumption.

Höfer, by contrast, turns her attention toward architectural interiors that embody cultural memory: museums, libraries, theaters, and archives emptied of human presence. Using only natural light and extended exposure times, while avoiding digital manipulation, she transforms institutional spaces into meditations on stillness, order, and duration. In her photographs, architecture appears suspended outside ordinary time.

“The camera is never a neutral recording machine; every fragment it captures is determined by the person behind the lens,” Thomas Struth once remarked. Describing his practice as an investigation into “the grammar of photography,” Struth moved from an early belief in photography’s documentary truth toward a sustained interrogation of its constructed nature.

A New Generation of the Düsseldorf School

Over the past five decades, the Düsseldorf School has evolved from documentary observation into conceptual inquiry; from meticulously crafted large-format prints into digitally mediated image systems; from photographing reality into appropriating, dismantling, and questioning the image itself. Yet its influence on contemporary photography remains remarkably persistent.

At the entrance of the exhibition stands one of the Bechers’ iconic water tower photographs. Arranged around it in an arc are works by younger artists including Sebastian Riemer, Jürgen Staack, the artist duo Hedda Schattanik and Roman Szczesny, alongside Alex Grein. While inheriting the typological logic of earlier generations, these artists shift their attention toward instability, fragmentation, material decay, and the uncertain status of images themselves.

Working through archival material, found imagery, and acts of recomposition, Schattanik and Szczesny destabilize photography’s documentary authority in favor of revealing how seeing and interpretation are culturally constructed. The duo described their contribution to the exhibition as intentionally flexible: works produced on fabric become foldable and modular, emphasizing mobility and impermanence rather than fixed objecthood.

Alex Grein, meanwhile, explores how digital images might recover a sense of material presence within an increasingly immaterial visual culture. In one three-channel video installation, butterflies rest atop iPad screens displaying Google Earth. By digitally navigating toward the insects’ original habitats, the work imagines a poetic gesture of “bringing endangered butterflies home.”

The Düsseldorf School today no longer clings to traditional representation. Digital technologies—and increasingly artificial intelligence—have become both medium and subject. Rather than celebrating technological fluency, however, many younger artists use AI critically, exposing the instability of image production itself.

In his V1S10N series, Jürgen Staack references the resurgence of Romantic landscape painting prompted by the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich’s iconic motifs—mountains, barren trees, ruined churches—are grotesquely distorted into uncanny digital landscapes, satirizing the frictionless perfection of AI-generated scenery.

Contemporary Chinese Artists Respond

The exhibition also positions four Chinese artists—Yang Di, Shi Yangkun, Gao Yutao, and Liu Shiyuan—in dialogue with the Düsseldorf School’s modes of seeing. Through photography, installation, and moving image, their works incorporate local experience while confronting broader questions surrounding memory, mediation, and visual perception.

Also drawing on Friedrich’s imagery, Yang Di—who graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf—offers a counterpoint to Staack’s AI-inflected landscapes in his work Ideal Scene. Based on a typological study of window structures from different architectural periods in Shanghai, Yang reconstructs fragments of urban windows while stacking white foam boards into iceberg-like formations. Referencing Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (Das Eismeer), the work reflects on failed utopian aspirations and the collapse of everyday “experience.”

Gao Yutao, likewise trained in Düsseldorf, works across photography, installation, performance, and video. Speaking about the exhibition layout, he observed that “the water tower almost becomes a signal tower, with our works orbiting around it.” His Four Seasons series uses a flatbed scanner to image mineral specimens, shifting between microscopic and cosmic scales in a distinctly Eastern mode of perception reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of “Mount Sumeru contained within a mustard seed.” Even stray cat hair from the artist’s studio appears enlarged within the scans as an “automatic accident.”

Romantic Realism and the Persistence of Beauty

Moving through the fair, one realization becomes unavoidable: romantic realism in photography has never truly disappeared.

Alongside the Düsseldorf School’s cool conceptual rigor, many galleries presented historically significant photographic works grounded in emotional intensity, formal precision, and human experience. Beyond the detached language of conceptual photography, these artists remain committed to light, atmosphere, narrative, and the emotional charge of reality itself.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Michel Sima began photographing Pablo Picasso in 1946. Closely connected to artists associated with the School of Paris, Sima brought a sculptor’s sensitivity to volume and light into his photographic portraits, capturing moments of intimacy and creative vulnerability rarely visible in public representations of major artists.

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre presented Wang Wusheng’s black-and-white photographs of Huangshan Mountain, whose layered compositions evoke the spirit of Chinese ink painting. Nearby, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie showcased Ilanit Illouz’s volcanic landscape project centered on Mount Etna. Photographing flowing lava and mineral formations, Illouz captures both geological violence and fragile vitality, incorporating crystallized salt directly onto photographic surfaces to create mineral textures within the prints themselves.

The classical black-and-white photography of Robert Mapplethorpe once appeared radically transgressive. Gladstone Gallery presented landmark works spanning calla lilies, ocean waves, and horses—subjects through which Mapplethorpe distilled flowers, bodies, and landscapes into pure sculptural form.

In a striking juxtaposition, nearby gallery ART ON SPACE exhibited new media artist Ivona Tau’s AI-based Calla Lilyworks alongside Mapplethorpe’s modernist classicism. Rather than relying on mass datasets, Tau developed her own AI system to resist algorithmic homogenization, reframing questions of authorship, copyright, and bodily boundaries in the digital age. The dialogue between AI-generated imagery and the classicism of silver gelatin prints suggests that artificial intelligence need not flatten artistic individuality; under critical artistic control, algorithms themselves may become tools for singular expression.

Opening with an exhibition tracing fifty years of the Düsseldorf School, this year’s PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai foregrounded a crucial historical transformation: photography’s evolution from “nature’s brush” into a conceptual and philosophical medium. E. H. Gombrich’s famous assertion—“There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.”—remains equally relevant within photography today.

As artists continue adapting to technological change, they simultaneously dismantle and reconstruct the grammar of images themselves, asking how photography might survive within an increasingly algorithmic world. In an age dominated by automation and endless visual circulation, the act of looking acquires renewed urgency: photography begins with looking, passes through emotion, and persists as a form of reflection.

©Michel SIMA, Marcel DUCHAMP, 1955, courtesy of Boogie Woogie Photography & The Sima Estate