New professor of photography: Anja Weber

Renowned photographer Anja Weber will take over the professorship for photography in the Visual Communication program in the winter semester of 2022/23. For her, critical thinking and the understanding of design as a socially relevant tool are key competencies for tomorrow’s designers. Her goal is to support students in taking their own authorship seriously and to train them to reflect on their own power of action.

Anja Weber has been working for editorial offices, institutions, artists and companies since 1998. Her portraits and reportages examine current socio-political contexts and critically examine practices of image production. In her artistic projects, Anja Weber researches the topics of representation, identity and space as well as questions of staging and assertion of reality in photographic images. In collaboration with actors from architecture, performance and music, she creates photographic series and multimedia installations. Anja Weber studied photography and film/video in Dortmund, Exeter and New York. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University and the International Center of Photography. From 2017–19 she taught photography at the German University in Cairo.

At the Merz Akademie, Anja Weber will be a professor of visual communication starting in the winter semester of 2022/23. “Photography has a utopian power. It can create fantastic visual worlds or depict realities of life that are unseen. I want to enable students to help shape an inclusive and solidary society as designers,” says Anja Weber, describing her teaching approach. “The Merz Akademie serves as an open space for experimentation and exploring one’s own limits.”

The photography/image course offered by the professorship is aimed at students in all areas—crossmedia publishing, film and video, new media and visual communication—of the bachelor’s degree program in design, art and media. Rector Maren Schmohl is pleased “to have found in Anja Weber a personality who combines aesthetic openness, media reflexivity and cultural and social critical discursiveness.” Dean Peter Ott adds: “With Anja Weber’s interdisciplinary practice and her teaching approach, which focuses on the role of photography in the face of urgent social transformation processes, she fits very well into the profile of the Merz Akademie. Students benefit directly from her network of media, culture, sciences, and politics.”

Merz Akademie is a nationally accredited, non-profit University of Applied Art, Design and Media was founded in 1918. With a strong interest in the disciplines of the humanities, social and cultural studies, design, art, and technology, Merz Akademie positions itself as a unique place of learning, combining elements of a classical art academy, a technical college, and a department of humanities. It aims to facilitate the professional and academic education of design-authors who are prepared not only to fulfil but to define the requirements of an ever changing professional field.