Elmar Mauch

Elmar Mauch is a visual researcher and artist living in Dortmund, Germany. After studying photography at the FH Dortmund (Gelpke/Adler), he taught at various art academies in Germany and Switzerland, including from 1994-1999 as an artistic-scientific assistant for artistic photography at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, courses in photo theory and photo history at the F +F Zurich, and from 2002-2009 as a lecturer in photography at the Zürich University of the Arts.

In 2011, he founded the Institute for Artistic Image Research, a hybrid project between intelligent image research and artistic statement. The basis of the institute is an extensive collection of everyday photographs, the "Archive of Orphaned Images". These images from a thousand sources are the starting point for questioning, experimenting and gaining knowledge. From this fund, into which he also incorporates his own photographs, new resonance spaces for cognitive processes are created with radical but also cautious creative interventions and anti-archival methods.