Open Class is an experimental course format that provides space for your own project ideas and intensive exchange within the group. You are free to choose from a variety of media, ranging from photography, film and installation to drawing and digital formats. Each semester, Open Class focuses on a different theme, but the main emphasis is on developing your own individual questions.

This semester’s focus is on ‘Image Power’ – the power of the image. ‘Power’ here refers not only to the social and political effectiveness of images, but also quite literally to their ecological constitution, their energy consumption and their resources. We are concerned with the pressing question of what images will be in the future, what social impact they will have and under what material conditions they will be created.

Images shape our present – and they design our future. Visual narratives influence how we understand the world, what we consider possible and what we desire. Photographic images have always moved between two poles: on the one hand, they are manipulable and embedded in power and market structures. On the other hand, they can be used to take a stand and assume responsibility. Images have the power to imagine, to make the marginalised visible and to illuminate – or expose – what has been overlooked until now.

While data waste accounts for a significant portion of global image traffic and ‘millions of nearly identical images’ are created in digital marketing (Hito Steyerl), there is a growing need to consciously employ subjectivity. Photography has always been a question of perspective: what appears significant? What is brought into focus? And what remains invisible? It is important not to simply reproduce this uniformity, but to understand images as constructive and hopeful forces. The counter-movement is: more precise images, slower images, more conscious images.

This can give rise to very different projects in the course: for example, works that deal with community, belonging and the view of the other – with forms of closeness and distance, solidarity or exclusion. Equally conceivable are positions that examine how images shape identity and coexistence or reveal new forms of togetherness. At the same time, the meta-level of the images themselves can be addressed – their circulation and their material and ecological conditions. We can make fewer, but more conscious images, e.g. one image per week – and in the end perhaps exhibit only one.

During the semester, we will be in close contact with students from the Design Department at HSBI Bielefeld under the direction of Prof. Dr. Rafael Dernbach (Media Theory). Projects will be presented and further developed in joint meetings. The aim is to achieve a conscious transfer between theory and practice. The resulting works will be exhibited in November as part of the ‘Imag(e)ining Futures’ conference.

The event will kick off with a zine workshop with Tessa von Both on narratives of the future.
On 12 May, artist Alina Schmuch will give a lunch lecture providing insights into her work on ecological and social infrastructures and her perspectives on new imaging techniques.
In June, there will be an excursion to the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg – Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other (2026).

In addition to the course, it is recommended that students take the TP Presentation Formats Photography course.

Questions about the course? Meet me in the course selection Zoom on Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.:
https://thws-de.zoom-x.de/j/62559226996

Possible discussion material includes:
Hito Steyerl, Medium – Hot. Images in Times of Heat (2025)
Michelle Henning, A Dirty History of Photography (2025)
Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (2017)
Mining Photography – The Ecological Footprint of Image Production, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2022)
Community – Photography and Community, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2026)
9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other (2026)