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Sophie Thun | The Body Intervening into Developing Process

Preface

At a time when photography is increasingly detached from materiality and driven toward instant circulation and consumption, Sophie Thun's pr offers an important point of reference. Her work proposes a form of photography grounded in bodily engagement, duration, and physical contact. Here, the image is not simply an outcome, but an event—generated through gesture, space, and chemical processes. In this conversation, Sophie reflects on the core threads of her practice: using her body as an operative tool, treating the darkroom as a “mold” that allows spatial and physical conditions to shape the work, and beginning from decisions of scale that compress posture, waiting, and development into a single plane.

Sophie’s thinking unfolds through movement. As her works travel from darkroom to exhibition space, each site leaves its imprint. Her commitment to analog processes is not nostalgic, but rooted in a belief in the coexistence of media and in a concern for photography’s material future. Attentive to the relationship between images and power, she stresses the urgency of visual literacy today. For Sophie, change is not an obstacle but a condition: discontinued papers, closing darkrooms, and fading colors are all absorbed into her practice. This interview invites us to reconsider whether photography, even as it becomes increasingly dematerialized, can continue to operate as a form of thinking and making that is deeply entangled with the body, time, and space.

Interview

Part1
The Body as the Working Tool

Qiuyu： Your work is significant in the way the body reappears in your practice. But it is not like a traditional self-portrait. Rather, the body functions as part of a photographic tool. So how do you distinguish between self-representation and using your body as a working instrument or tool?

©️Sophie Thun
SOPHIE TAPPEINER at Art Basel Paris, 2024
Reproductions by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

I’m glad you use the word “self-representation. ”

For me, it is not just about self-portraiture, but about using the body as a working tool. When I began working with photography, I used my body to create the work, but never in a directly visible way.

It was more about engaging with rooms. In my early works, I would photograph something like a wall, then make a life-sized print and cover that section of wall with its image.

At the same time, I was rendering the original invisible through its own representation. I was hanging the image over the actual place.

Sophie Thun：

I can disappear through multiplication in that way.

Through the image, making the original invisible or diluting it. And because my prints are almost exclusively analog, I include a lot of photographs in the work and extremely rarely make additions.

In that sense, the body was used almost like a negative through multiplication and photograms.

Sophie Thun：

The second thing I was interested in was making all the places of production of the print visible.

I was always holding the shutter release in my hands, which shows the moment of shooting. And in the darkroom, in my first works, I always included the shutter release of the enlarger, which made the moment of printing visible.

I was compressing and making visible various places and layers, sandwiching time so that time is no longer linear but appears on one surface.

I was also interested in the depiction of the female nude in art history. A lot of other interests also crept in.

©️Sophie Thun
Stolberggasse 13 zu Friedrichstrasse 12
Silvergelatine print and photogram on bayta paper, steel, magnets, 2020
Reproductions by kunst-dokumentation.com

Qiuyu：As you said, your hands often appear in the image in the recent works in the white border. You make them as negatives, and as you mentioned, it looks like it is interfering with the structure of the photography.

For me, this gesture looks like a form of bodily signature or compositional for the photography. It interrupts the photographic image again. At the same time, there's an image, and then you use your hands, your body to interrupt the image voucher. like stretch image.

Sophie Thun：

Yes, I think it brings out this idea that a photograph or any imprint compresses time.

I once worked with an archive of Ulay (1943–2020), who always used himself as material and talked about self-representation as performing for the camera.

In my case, I perform not only for the camera but also for the photographic paper and in the darkroom. Many choreographies are happening in the darkroom for the paper, and what the viewer sees are recordings of bodily movements, including the hands.

©️Sophie Thun
SOPHIE TAPPEINER at Art Basel Paris, 2024
Reproductions by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

I studied graphic design in Krakow and then applied to the class of Daniel Richter, a painter in Vienna. I was in Vienna studying painting, working very classically with oil on canvas. The first thing I would always do is build my canvases myself.

I had some initial ideas, but a large part of the painting developed while I was making it. I'd figure out that painting or a big part of it was happening while I was making it.

I never bought ready-made canvases; I bought pieces of wood and canvas and assembled them myself. My first decision was always the size.

When I started working with photography, it was very confusing for me that you could start with an image and only later decide everything else. Like scale, so the final size of the print, color, or what kind of surface it would be.

Because of that, I made a set of rules for my practice, and many of them came directly from painting.

©️Sophie Thun
Double Release (Durchgang)
Analoge Farbfotografie + Fotogramm, Klammern, 2018
Reproductions by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

Regarding scale, these are usually 8×10 or 4×5 negatives placed directly on the darkroom paper and held flat. If I enlarge, then to life-size, which results in very large prints.

There is always something bigger or smaller, whatever we call reality.

Qiuyu：

What I find very interesting is that you decide the size of the photograph first. As you said, you work either with very large prints or with contact prints, and that is quite unusual.

For many photographers today, deciding on size is very difficult because photography can exist in so many forms, analog or digital, large or small, in almost any scale. I think this is related to how we experience images now, when we see them both physically and digitally.

Today, people often talk about “the image” without thinking about its size at all. The sense of scale seems to be disappearing, and photographs circulate almost independently of their physical dimensions. I think this raises an interesting question about photography in relation to size, and also about how time and space are experienced through images.

Sophie Thun：

I also think that the everyday use of digital images plays a role. When I use my phone and look at an image, and then I zoom zooming or swipe. I used to never crop; I would print on photographic paper that had limits in the darkroom.

At some point, I started cropping after printing, by physically cutting the print. This idea may also come from contemporary everyday image use entering my practice.

a.©️Sophie Thun, Contact: Wallensteinstraße to Poljanski nasip to Blücherstraße
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame 2024

b. ©️Sophie Thun, Contact: Room 4 – Remember
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame 2024

c. ©️Sophie Thun, Contact: Room 4 – Seven Times (+1 z M.D. w wannie w Gdańsku)
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame 2024

Sophie Thun：

I was thinking it is similar to the painting while making it with darkroom work.

In the photograph, there is usually an image as a starting point, but in the darkroom, it gets reassembled and layered again. I am thinking about the final image happens not only before I shoot it, but also while I am making it.

The hands first appeared by mistake.

When making contact prints, people normally use glass to keep everything flat. Because I am nocturnal and was always working at night in Vienna, most places were closed, and I didn’t have glass or cleaning liquid. I used my hands to keep the negatives more or less flat, and this then became a method.

In that sense, a lot of this also comes from the idea that the medium mixes up with the brain, that the making is the thinking.

Part2
Invisible Produce Space Shifts to the Visible Backstage

Qiuyu： I think this may also relate to the fact that you work extensively in darkrooms, which function as a kind of empty or closed space.

The darkroom has its own material conditions and its own way of working; it is not a public space. Because of that, the presence of the hand feels very natural, whether or not the viewer is familiar with darkroom processes. It feels closely connected to the act of working in that space.

You mentioned that you did not study photography before studying painting. I wanted to ask about your early interest in photographing darkrooms, storage spaces, and other places that are normally not open to the public. Did you think of these spaces as a kind of backstage? Was this sense of non-public space already present in your earliest interests?

©️Sophie Thun
Zwischen Licht und Wand,Museum der Moderne, Rupertinum
Salzburg, Ausstellungsansicht, 2024
Exhibition views by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

With the darkroom, you could say I am making the backstage visible. I have always been interested in the tension between the visible and the invisible.

This is also why I photograph windows. Windows are an obvious photographic reference. Some of the first photographs were taken from windows (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826-27).

But they also embody this tension. They let light in, and they also block it. They are large openings and rooms that kind of are just there.

©️Sophie Thun
Negative to positive to negative to positive
Amsterdam to Resljeva to Vienna to Blücherstraße
photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame2024

Sophie Thun：

What you mentioned about the darkroom as a space is something I am definitely interested in.

My large-format darkroom work is done horizontally. It works a bit like a cinema. The projector is on one side, and the wall onto which the image is projected is on the other. I place the photographic paper on the wall and the negative inside the enlarger. In this sense, the enlarger works like a camera, but in the opposite direction.

Sometimes I even photograph the darkroom from the same perspective as the enlarger, so there is a circular movement, light being absorbed and light being projected in the same direction and place. Everything that happens between the light and the wall enters the image.

Like in a cinema, if someone walks in while a film is being projected, their shadow becomes part of the image.

Sophie Thun：

In the case of the darkroom, the process is similar to casting in sculpture: the room itself becomes the mold for the work. The dimensions of the room determine how large I can print.

So before shooting, if I am planning a large print, I first go to the darkroom, measure the length of the room, and decide which lens I need to use. I then take the photograph from the correct distance to be able to print it life-size.

During printing, the projection can last up to twenty minutes. All my movements during that time, performing for the paper, are entered in the print, along with reflections from the room. The entire room is compressed into a single flat surface.

©️Sophie Thun
Refragmented Room 3 – Oberkasseler Straße to
Blücherstraße to Poljanski nasip to Regent’s Park to Piwna to Blücherstraße, Floor Two to Three
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame 2024

Qiuyu： When you perform for the paper, I’m wondering what kind of emotional experience that involves. What are you thinking during that time?

Sophie Thun：

It can become quite intense. I sometimes have working sessions of around 27 hours. It is a very slow process, especially because the prints are large, and there is also all the washing, drying, and waiting. Everything is very wet.

Ulay once said that what defines analog photography is this wetness. Inkjet printing is also wet, but it is more compressed and more controlled.

©️Sophie Thun
ZDZ and me in the bath
Silvergelatine print and photogram on bayta paper,2021
Reproduction by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

In terms of what I am thinking, I feel that the brain enters a different plane when you are making something. It becomes more like visual thinking.

Part of it is purely compositional: while the image is being projected, I think about whether something is too bright or too dark, or whether something should be added. At that moment, I am mostly thinking about, or through, seeing.

With color work, I worked in complete darkness. With B&W, I can use red light, but in a large darkroom, there is usually very little red light, so you still don’t see very well.

Of course, your eyes adapt, but it also becomes much more about hearing and moving differently within the space.

Sophie Thun：

And in works where I am pressed flat against the paper for a long time, it is very physical. Do you know Bruce Nauman’s work Body Pressure (1974)? I often think about that piece when I am working. It could become a very erotic exercise.

©️Sophie Thun
Backstage 2, silvergelatine print on baryta paper，2023
Exhibition view ‘Back Stages’, 2023–24, ARAC, Bucharest

Qiuyu： Looking at your photographs, the darkrooms you work in seem very different from those in Japan. In Europe, as you mentioned, darkrooms often feel more open, whereas in Japan, they are usually much smaller and more fragmented, closer to what I’ve seen in London.

Here, different functions are separated into very small rooms: one for developing, one for printing, and then you go outside to check the print. Because of that, people rarely think of the darkroom itself as a space that could be photographed or worked with creatively. The machines are placed in different locations, and the space becomes very segmented and personal.

Before this conversation, I had never really thought about how darkrooms themselves differ so much across countries and cultural contexts, or how these spaces shape the way people work inside them. That difference was very interesting to me.

Sophie Thun：

And it also leads to different body movements. But I think in Europe, many darkrooms are actually quite similar to what you describe.

When I was studying, the color darkroom we had was extremely small, maybe two square meters or even less. It was just big enough for one enlarger and for you to barely move while working.

At some point, I had the idea that I wanted to make a life-size photogram of my whole body.

You’ve met me; I’m very tall, 187 cm, so that already implies a large scale. I wanted to make a contact print of myself holding an 8×10-inch negative: a full-body, life-size contact print.

©️Sophie Thun
Art Basel Paris, Installation view, 2024
Exhibition view: Pascal Petignat

Sophie Thun：

I started researching whether such large photographic paper even existed and whether it was technically possible.

Through this idea, I found a darkroom in Vienna that had a horizontal enlarger. I didn’t even know such darkrooms existed before. I just had this image in mind and tried to figure out how to make it. Later, that darkroom in Vienna closed, but I found one in Berlin. I would travel there, and they allowed me to work at night: they closed at six, and I could continue working afterward.

Qiuyu： The darkroom I used in Mainz was extremely large. I think it reflected the personal interests of the technician who built it; he designed very large machines that could be moved on rails. But no one actually used the space, because students rarely worked with analog photography anymore, so the darkroom was almost always empty.

©️Sophie Thun: Stolberggasse,
Exhibition view, Grafisches Kabinett,
Secession, Vienna, 2020

Sophie Thun：

That’s actually why I started working with analog photography. I’m forty now, and when I moved to Vienna in my early twenties, analog photography was completely out. No one used the darkroom.

I was studying painting at the time, and it was a very different moment, wilder times at the art academies in Vienna. There were many students, and everything was very intense. And at some point, I discovered that one floor below our class, there was a darkroom that was almost always empty. I could close the door and work alone. That felt like a luxury, having your own workspace, not having to work or think in public.

What you said about Mainz also makes me wonder whether this is more common in Germany.

Perhaps darkrooms there tend to be more spacious. There is also a strong tradition of very large prints, which implies a different approach to the space in which photography happens. That tradition really began in the 1980s, when advertising budgets grew, and large prints were produced for places like airports. Artists later adopted these formats because the industry had already made them possible.

Part3

From the Exhibition Space to the Darkroom Space

Qiuyu：I think photography, even today, has always been closely tied to technical processes. Analog and digital are not so different in that sense: your work is never entirely autonomous or purely personal.
That’s why I want to return to the experience of the darkroom for a moment. For me, working in the darkroom always involves waiting. This waiting is deeply connected to the space itself.

It appears like empty time, but it is actually a time in-between, between one action and another, with a clear beginning and end.

What interests me is how this experience of waiting disappears once the work enters the exhibition space. In exhibitions, time is usually controlled by the audience rather than by the process. I wonder whether the exhibition space functions for you as another form of practice, especially in relation to time and spatial experience.

Sophie Thun：

Yes, I definitely see the exhibition space as part of the practice, especially in terms of time dynamics. In a way, the darkroom and the exhibition space are similar. They are both rooms.

There is a sentence about darkroom by the writer Hélène Giannechini that I really like: she describes visiting the apartment of Alix Cléo Roubaud and wanting to see the darkroom she had read so much about, half kitchen, half bathroom, as darkrooms often are.

©️Sophie Thun
SOPHIE TAPPEINER at Frieze London, Booth H11
Exhibition view, 2023

Sophie Thun：

When she entered the space, she realized she would never actually see it, because a darkroom only exists when it is being used. Otherwise, it is just a room.

I think the same is true for exhibition spaces. They are only exhibition spaces when an exhibition is taking place.

Both are enclosed spaces, separated from the outside world by walls. What interests me in both contexts is how bodies move within these spaces.

©️Sophie Thun
Nocturnal, Keijiban, Yonkai, 2025
Reproduction by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

In the darkroom, it is my own body; in the exhibition space, it is the bodies of others. Sometimes the work is placed in doorways, so viewers have to walk through it; sometimes it occupies the space directly.

I am interested in viewing distances, windows, and how these conditions shape perception. This also affects the scale of the work.

Recently, I showed a piece at Keijiban, Yonkai Space (Gallery in Kanazawa, Japan) that I had previously exhibited elsewhere. Because the ceiling was lower, I cut the work to fit the new space.

In that sense, the spatial conditions of Yonkai in Kanazawa are now inscribed into the work itself. So sometimes, after a work is made, a new space enters it, almost like a mold. The space becomes visible, not necessarily as an image, but as a physical condition.

©️Sophie Thun
SOPHIE TAPPEINER at Frieze London
Booth H11, Exhibition view, 2023
Reproduction by kunst-dokumentation.com

Qiuyu： Today, especially in museums, we often think of photography as a medium presented within an empty, neutral space. But in your work, the space seems to function differently. It’s not simply that the work hangs on a wall; it exists somewhere in between. As you mentioned, you even adjust or cut the work to respond to a specific space, and I found that approach very compelling.

Sophie Thun：

The exhibition space is never isolated. It always exists within a broader environment, within a city, a building, and a specific context. All of this inevitably influences how I work with the space and what I do within it.

The exhibition space has a very strong impact on the work. I’m interested not only in photography or painting as individual media, but also in the exhibition itself as a form. What does an exhibition actually consist of? What is a room, and where does the work really take place?

These questions about space, both physical and contextual, are central to how I think about making and presenting my work.

Part4 The Thickness of Medium, Change, and Future

Qiuyu： I was thinking about the exhibition documentation you shared with me in your portfolio. Today, photography is often understood as an image centered within a frame, almost like a still from a film.

But when I look at the documentation photo of your exhibitions, I start wondering how these works might function in the future.

How might future audiences encounter your work through these exhibition archives, and what kind of experience do you imagine, or hope for them?

Sophie Thun：

I honestly don’t know. I’m lucky some of the larger works have been acquired by museums, so at least they’ll be properly stored and preserved.

What I’ve always found confusing but also fascinating about photography is that it’s fundamentally about displacement. If I photograph you right now, your image on my screen, at my desk, in my apartment, and then show that photograph somewhere else, something is always being moved from one place into another.

©️Sophie Thun
Backstage 1,
C Print and photograms, 2023
Exhibition view ‘Back Stages’, 2023–24, ARAC, Bucharest

Sophie Thun：

The image inevitably carries traces of its original situation while entering a new spatial context. This also applies to site-specific works. Once such a work moves into a museum or another exhibition space, it becomes entangled with a new environment. That mixing of spaces is unavoidable.

Sophie Thun：

I'm also very interested in sound. When we speak in the same room, the shape of the room, our bodies, and even the form of our ears all influence how sound travels and how it’s perceived. With light in the darkroom, something similar happens.

Everything surrounding the process: walls, bodies, movements, shapes how light reaches the photographic paper.

In that sense, the room functions as a mold.

Sophie Thun：

The exhibition space is simply another kind of mold. But it has a different thickness. An exhibition has a defined beginning and end; it unfolds within a limited time frame. In that sense, it resembles a kind of waiting period between two points in time.

I sometimes work directly within this temporal framework. I’ve had several exhibitions in which I was physically present throughout the exhibition period. In one case, in Kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga, Latvia, I worked with an archive during the exhibition, producing the exhibition while it was ongoing.

This was also one of the rare moments when I broke my own rule of enlarging only from my own negatives, since working with archival material requires a different approach.

Sophie Thun：

That exhibition lasted about two months. In a way, the time of the darkroom expanded into exhibition time.

The temporal “thickness” of the darkroom and that of the exhibition space are different but they are deeply connected. That difference, and the movement between them, is something I’m very interested in.

Qiuyu：Are there any forms of exhibition or experiments that you still feel you need to do, something you haven’t yet realized or experienced?

Sophie Thun：

Yes. With the painting, actually. I started with graphic design and then painting, and I always feel that at some point I will bring painting and photography closer together, although I haven’t done that yet. It’s something I still want to explore.

I once spoke with a painter friend who is older than me, and he said that with age it becomes increasingly difficult to develop new visual languages. But I don’t really have that problem, or maybe I have a different kind of challenge, because photography as a medium is constantly, and rapidly, changing. You’re always forced to adapt.

In my case, this is also very concrete. Darkrooms keep closing. Kodak stops producing certain color papers. Labs disappear.

These changes deeply affect how work can be made. Kodak and Fuji papers are fundamentally different, not only technically, but culturally. Their color schemes differ, especially in relation to light and skin tones. Color prints also don’t last very long, and restoration becomes an issue. You can’t simply recreate a print made on Kodak paper using Fuji paper; they follow completely different logics.

This leads to broader questions about conservation. In the ‘Western’ tradition, there is this strong idea of preserving the original work of a singular artistic genius. When people visit the Sistine Chapel, they are often focused on seeing Michelangelo’s original masterpiece.

©️Sophie Thun
Sophie Tappeiner at Vienna Contemporary
installation view, booth F13, 2019.
Installation view by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

Photography complicates this. When color photographs fade, restoration usually happens digitally. The restored image is no longer the same material object. It becomes a digital reconstruction. This creates a strange rupture in ideas of originality and preservation.

In Japan, I know that some very old temples are preserved by being taken apart and rebuilt every few decades. The structure continues through renewal rather than through material permanence. In that sense, photography conservation in the West might actually resemble this logic more than we realize.

I’m interested in this tension because my own work accepts change. Each exhibition space enters the work. Each room leaves its trace. The work is not fixed; it keeps transforming. I don’t fully understand all of this yet, but it’s something I’m still trying to think through.

Part5

The Critical Power around Photography

Qiuyu：I wonder whether you still see photography as having a particular kind of critical power today. Not necessarily in an overtly political sense, but as a medium with a specific power that differs from painting or literature.

A power that operates between visibility and invisibility, between the body, the laboratory, and the time embedded in the process itself. More broadly, I’m curious about how you understand the power of photography in a contemporary context.

Sophie Thun：

I do think photography has a critical power, but also a high potential for distortion or even abuse.

With photography, representation and reality become mixed up more easily than with painting or sculpture. Wittgenstein once pointed this out in a very simple way: if I show you a photograph of someone and say, “Doesn’t this look exactly like her?”, it’s actually absurd.

A person is a three-dimensional body, while a photograph is just a flat, rectangular paper surface, in the times of Wittgenstein, of course. In reality, they look nothing alike.

©️Sophie Thun
Release release release (Y95,1M13,6D60,2F8T7,2m10,153CA3B450)
analogue colour photography and photogram, 2018

Sophie Thun：

And yet, we constantly speak about photographs as if they were reality itself.

Wittgenstein also writes that we might look at a B&W photograph and say, “the blond boy,” even though the image only shows shades of gray.

Photography encourages this confusion between image and world. In that sense, photography’s critical power lies precisely in this slippage. Through images, it can reveal things, but it can also mislead or manipulate.

At the same time, photography has become extremely mobile. Images now circulate in ways that were previously only possible through institutional or political power structures. This circulation itself carries power.

Of course, we also have to consider the apparatus. Cameras and imaging technologies are programmed in very specific ways. The power of photography is therefore not only in the image, but also in who designs the machines, how they are built, and what kinds of actions they allow or restrict.

Qiuyu： I’m also thinking about what you mentioned earlier, the industrial power behind images.

Even when people talk about hyper image generation or new technologies, photography itself already contains a kind of violence or danger. Yet many artists prefer not to confront this directly, perhaps because they want to treat images as “artistic,” separate from the images we consume in everyday life.

But for me, these are not fundamentally different. Whether we encounter images in an exhibition space or on a laptop screen, the visual experience depends on how we look, how we focus, and how we think.

So I don’t really see a clear boundary between exhibition images and everyday images. The boundary seems to exist inside the body, inside the viewer, rather than in the space itself.

©️Sophie Thun
I Don’t Remember a Thing: Entering the Elusive Estate of ZDZ
Exhibition view, KimContemporary Art Center, Riga, 2021
Installation view by Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Sophie Thun：

It’s interesting that you speak about boundaries being inside the body.

I grew up Catholic, and my parents took us to church every Sunday. In Bavaria, where my German relatives live, and where we spent our childhood summers, there are many Baroque churches. These churches were of course built before electricity, and the altar paintings were made for very specific heights and lighting conditions.

The proportions of these paintings are adjusted to the viewer’s bodily position. They are often stretched because they are meant to be seen from below. The frame is part of the architecture and at the same time part of the painting. You don’t really know where the painting ends and where the architecture begins. When you later see these altar paintings in a museum, hung at eye level, the experience is completely different. The context, the height, the light, all of that is gone changed.

I think this influenced my interest in the edges of the work and how the edges of the work and the room mix, where the room begins, and how these boundaries overlap and dissolve. And then there are bodies inside the space. If people photograph inside the exhibition, new images enter the room as well.

It becomes a layering of images, bodies, spaces, and perspectives. This thickness of space, of time, of visibility and invisibility is something I keep returning to. Maybe it’s also about displacement, or translocation, even if that’s not the perfect word.

©️Sophie Thun
Shifted (KJ MF MS AG FW LM AS EW),
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame, 2023
Exhibition view by Ansis Starks

Qiuyu： I think living with change, rather than simply “enjoying” it. It is crucial today.

Everything is changing extremely fast: photography, materials, environments, even our own bodies.

What interests me is how change appears both in your work and in the way your expressive space keeps shifting. It’s not about resisting change, but about choosing a medium consciously. For example, if someone continues to work with analogue photography today, it’s not necessarily because they refuse to change, but because they understand the world’s transformation and still find reasons to work with that medium. That kind of choice feels very meaningful to me.

I’m also curious how you talk about this with students, especially the question of why the darkroom still matters today.

Sophie Thun：

What I find interesting is that in photography there’s often this idea of replacement, digital replacing analogue, whereas in other fields that logic doesn’t dominate so much.

In sculpture, 3D printing doesn’t “replace” wood or stone; the media simply coexist. Painting has watercolor, oil, and acrylic. Each with different possibilities.

Photography, because it’s so closely tied to industry, often imports this replacement mindset into art, instead of thinking in terms of “this and also this.”

The darkroom is often framed as something old or nostalgic, when in fact it’s simply one practice that continues to exist within a changing field. In medicine, for example, X-rays are now digital; photography has shifted everywhere. The darkroom isn’t outside of that; it just occupies a different position.

For me, all of these are fantastic media. They just allow you to work differently. Personally, I’m interested in intervening in the apparatus, “hacking the program”, what Flusser writes about in "Towards a Philosophy of Photography", rather than simply following it.

I do this through analogue processes, but others do it brilliantly with digital tools. Both are valid.

©️Sophie Thun
Bijlmermeerstraat 2 (phone)
photograph and photogram on baryta paper in artist’s frame, 2024
Reproduction by kunst-dokumentation.com

Sophie Thun：

I also think it’s increasingly important to think about machines making images. There’s this idea that we’re becoming visually illiterate, that we see more, but understand less. Images are replacing written language more and more, so learning how to read images critically becomes essential.

Flusser already wrote in the 1980s that images were still tied to physical carriers, but would eventually become electromagnetic and free themselves from material supports. That feels very relevant today.

Sophie Thun

Born in 1985, lives and works in Vienna) works primarily with techniques of analogue photography, its spaces, processes as well as conditions of production and exhibition.Raised in Warsaw, Thun completed her master’s degree at the Academies of Fine Art in Vienna (2017, Martin Guttmann and Daniel Richter) and Krakow (2010). Thun was Interim Professor of the Photography Class at the Art Academy Düsseldorf from 2023-2025. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bregenz), Landesmuseum Oberösterreich (Linz), Lentos (Linz), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg) , SMART Museum (Chicago), DZ Bank Art Collection (Frankfurt), Kontakt Collection (Vienna), The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and Verbund Collection (Vienna).
Photograph by Etienne Malapert

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