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Johann Wachs is a Berlin-based photographer whose work explores the quiet drama of architectural detail, space and human traces. For more than ten years, he has refined a visual language shaped equally by artistic discipline and pictorial instinct: precise geometry, restrained compositions, a love of color, texture and a painterly sensitivity to moulding physical objects in light and shadow.
He studied art history, a training that sharpened his eye for composition, detail and the structural logic of images. It underpins his intellectual, research-driven approach to photography: every project is a quest to discover extraordinary locations and spaces to examine their form, context and inner architecture. This foundation also fuels his drive toward the painterly, creating photographs that often read like constructed scenes or quiet, architectural tableaux.
Johann’s lifelong fascination with finding, exploring and documenting ruins and lost places informs an important strand of his work. These spaces reveal the psychological charge of the past’s remnants lingering in the present and reshaping how we move through the world. He travels extensively to find his subjects, working across Europe, the desert West in the US, and the Orient. His projects unfold slowly, through walking, revisiting, and observing how spaces evolve with time. He works primarily with digital and medium-format photography, producing limited-edition prints on museum-grade paper.
In his photography, he applies his artistic gaze to uncover a hidden order of beauty in the built environment, and to turn this discovery into painting-like compositions.
