In 1979, Andreas Müller-Pohle — a Braunschweig-born media artist who had studied economics and communication sciences at the Universities of Hannover and Göttingen — founded European Photography as an independent art magazine for contemporary photography and new media. He has edited every issue since. Forty-five volumes and more than 116 issues later, the journal remains what it was from the start: a bilingual German-English platform for photographic discourse that treats the medium not as illustration but as a form of cultural inquiry.
Published biannually from Berlin under Müller-Pohle’s imprint Equivalence, each eighty-page issue pairs critical essays with artist portfolios, exhibition reviews, and theoretical texts that situate contemporary photographic practice within broader technological and cultural contexts. The contributor list across four decades reads like a compendium of the medium’s most important thinkers and practitioners. Müller-Pohle’s own theoretical contributions — particularly his writings on Visualism and his decade-long collaboration with the media philosopher Vilém Flusser — have been instrumental in shaping how photography is discussed in the German-speaking world. He edited Flusser’s major works into the ten-volume Edition Flusser, including the seminal Philosophy of Photography, and in 1986 published Flusser’s Does Writing Have a Future? on floppy disk, making him one of the pioneers of the e-book.
In 2001, Müller-Pohle received the European Photography Prize from the Reind M. De Vries Foundation — a one-time award for outstanding contributions to European photography. In 2023, he agreed to transfer his archive to the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, which also acquired a substantial part of his artistic work. For a journal that has accompanied every transformation in the medium — from analogue to digital, from darkroom to algorithm — the archive’s new home at one of Europe’s foremost media art institutions feels exactly right.
<a href="https://equivalence.com/">Visit European Photography