BERLIN.- Four months after the close of a major survey of her work, photographer and psychologist Christa Mayer will return to Berlin’s Haus am Kleistpark on August 20 for a conversation examining more than four decades of image-making shaped by empathy, psychology and an enduring fascination with the inner lives of people and places.
Mayer will speak with Katia Reich, Head of the Photography Collection at the Berlinische Galerie, in an event following the strong reception of Christa Mayer. Photography – The Work, which was presented at Haus am Kleistpark earlier this year.
The conversation offers a chance to look again at a body of work that occupies an unusual place in German photography. Mayer developed her practice while simultaneously pursuing a career as a psychologist and psychotherapist, and the two fields became deeply intertwined.
Some of her best-known photographs emerged from a Berlin psychiatric clinic, where she worked for more than two decades. Rather than approaching patients as distant subjects, Mayer sought a form of portraiture based on encounter and dialogue.
She described her approach as a search for individuality and for “beauty […] in the face of the Other,” creating what she called “dialogical portraits.” Her aim was to look without voyeurism, allowing facial expression, vulnerability and interior experience to become the real subjects of the photograph.
The exhibition at Haus am Kleistpark brought together black-and-white and color photographs from several important bodies of work. Among them were Absent I / II, created between 1979 and 1996; Healers, produced from 1982 to 1989; Creatives from 1987; and the long-running Children series, made between 1987 and 1992.
Mayer’s camera, however, was never confined to the clinical environment.
She photographed healers from different cultural backgrounds, from psychoanalysts to Indigenous practitioners, as well as painters, dancers and performers. Children became another recurring subject, often appearing in images in which ordinary play takes on an almost dreamlike atmosphere.
During periods spent in Italy and Istanbul, Mayer turned her attention outward to what she saw as the “street theater” of everyday urban life. In the flow of pedestrians and fleeting encounters, she looked for small dramas that could disappear almost as quickly as they appeared.
Over time, landscape became increasingly important.
Travelling through France, Italy, India and the United States, Mayer photographed coastlines and forests that seem less like straightforward descriptions of place than psychological spaces. Her landscapes are charged with the same ambiguity found in her portraits, becoming surfaces onto which questions of emotion, spirituality and the relationship between inner and outer worlds can be projected.
That movement between psychology and photography also led Mayer beyond the still image. She developed what she called the “video mirror,” an interactive method that incorporated patients’ thoughts and reflections into the work. One example is The Blue Man from 1990.
Two video works included in the Berlin exhibition further expanded this aspect of her practice: Ex Oriente Lux from 1992 and Absent from 2025, works in which portraiture and the urban environment become intertwined.
Mayer’s development as a photographer was closely connected to one of the most influential centers of postwar German photography. From 1980 to 1986, she attended courses, workshops and exhibitions at Berlin’s Werkstatt fr Photographie at the Volkshochschule Kreuzberg, founded by photographer Michael Schmidt.
The workshop became an important meeting point for a generation of photographers, and Mayer was among the relatively few women who established a lasting presence within that environment.
Recognition followed early. In 1983 she received the Contemporary German Photography Scholarship from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, and in 1987 she was awarded a working fellowship at P.S.1 in New York.
Yet Mayer’s photographic career continued to develop alongside her work in psychology. Born in Bad Kissingen in 1945, she studied psychology in Wrzburg and Berlin and worked as a psychologist in the German capital from 1972 until 2002. She also created photographic projects, videos and theater productions together with patients.
That professional background helps explain the particular intimacy of her photographs. Rather than simply documenting appearances, Mayer repeatedly searches for what might remain hidden beneath them.
Her images of psychiatric patients, artists, children, healers and landscapes may appear to belong to very different categories, but they are connected by a persistent question: how can photography make visible something that cannot easily be described?
In Mayer’s work, the answer is rarely explicit. Faces remain enigmatic. Landscapes resist easy interpretation. Moments in the street suggest stories without completing them.
The earlier exhibition, curated by Carolin Frster, reflected this breadth, extending from portraits and documentary observations to abstract compositions made from 2007 onward and text-and-image works that complicate the boundaries between photography and language.
A monograph titled Christa Mayer. Photography – The Work was published by DISTANZ Verlag in December 2025. Edited by Frster, the publication includes texts by Carolin Frster, Thomas Weski, Maren Lbbke-Tidow and Barbara Esch Marowski.
The August conversation now brings Mayer’s work back into focus in a more personal format. For the first time, she and Reich will discuss together the experiences, methods and ideas that have shaped a practice spanning more than forty years.
Christa Mayer and Katia Reich will be in conversation at Haus am Kleistpark, Grunewaldstr. 6–7, Berlin, on Thursday, August 20, 2026, at 7 p.m.
