How do artists approach documentary photography and storytelling? Quincy Mackay from The Game Magazine interviews Hannah Darabi, Benoît Grimbert, and Raisan Hameed, featured at EMOP 2025, to discuss their creative process.
Between Photos and Reality: Different Approaches to Documentary Photography at EMOP 2025
By Quincy Mackay
This year’s European Month of Photography (EMOP 2025) is centred around the group exhibition “what stands between us. Photography as a Medium for Chronicling” at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg in Berlin. Curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow, it asks questions about how images shape our understanding of the world, our relationship with far-off places and times, and how contemporary technology and events shape, and are shaped by photography.
In the lead-up to the exhibition, three photographers featured in the show—Hannah Darabi, Benoît Grimbert, and Raisan Hameed—discussed their approaches to documentary photography, how they relate to their realities, and the ways in which they present their work to audiences.
Grim Place, Great Music
Benoît Grimbert is a French photographer who explores the connections between artists and the places they lived in, focusing mainly on musicians. His urban photography exploring the lives of Ian Curtis, Nico, or Jim Morrison has taken him to unassuming places like the North Circular Road in London, housing estates in Manchester, or Californian suburbia. Coming from landscape photography, Benoît admits these are not classically picturesque places, but this is exactly what makes documenting them interesting.
“When I first went to London, I had a project to photograph the A1, the ‘Great North Road’ out of the city. I went there by bus. It was my first time there, and there is a very short section, only 300 meters, where the A1 is the same road as the North Circular. Of course, that is where I arrived, and it is a very big road, so I thought, okay, this is it, and I followed it. It was only when I got back to Paris that I realised that I had photographed the wrong road.”
That accident produced a series that explored the relics of London’s urbanism in the 1960s. The march of the automobile demanded ever wider roads, and this northern part of London’s ring road paid little regard for the city in the path of its construction. Today, that bulldozer approach leaves pockets of semi-abandoned, often inexplicable urban spaces where time seems to flow a little differently. Benoît’s natural, precise photographs transmit this unusual stacking of time by giving viewers plenty of space to unearth the unremarkable, easy-to-overlook details that make these places unique.
“I remember when I showed this in Paris, there was a student who saw the exhibition, and at first, she said she didn’t really get anything from the photos. But then, after she had spent time with them, maybe a few hours, she found all of these new interpretations.” This prompting style of documentary photography does not want to make a specific point about a place but tries to bring people as close as possible to those places to understand them.
“You can’t understand the music of Ian Curtis, for example, until you have been to Manchester.” We joke that there seems to be a connection between dreary places and fantastic music. Benoît explored one such connection with his collaborator Hannah Darabi with their project Neuköln “Heroes,” which is revisited in what stands between us and follows David Bowie’s footsteps in the Berlin district of Neukölln.
Hannah Darabi was born in Tehran, where she studied photography at the Faculty of Fine Art, before moving to Paris in 2007, where she studied at the University of Paris Saint-Denis. Currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, her “documentary style” photography plays with our perceptions of places to make us question the relationship between the viewer, the photograph and the subject. Both she and Benoît photograph mainly urban landscapes, and their collaboration between 2011 and 2013 on the Neuköln “Heroes” project was fruitful, particularly because of their matched styles, to the point that it “wasn’t necessary” to give direct credits to their respective photographs. “Although we did make sure that we had exactly the same number of photos each,” adds Hannah, laughing. “That was important.”
The project came about to explore the remains of the Berlin that Bowie lived in during the 1970s. The work was prompted by something he said in an interview: “There’s a track on the album called Neuköln, and that’s the area of Berlin where the Turks are shackled in bad conditions.”
“To me, that’s quite prejudiced, even racial language that Bowie uses, and it feels like his white perspective of Neukölln,” I observe. “Were you trying to find his imagined version of Neukölln, or criticise it?”
Hannah pushes back against my interpretation of their work. “It’s about refusing storytelling.” Again, they do not want to use photography to present one narrative about Neukölln or another, but rather transfer some sense of the place to allow viewers to grasp at the reality that Bowie is presenting with his description of Neukölln, and indeed, with the music on the album. That required not only travelling to Neukölln, but developing a technique that allowed them to glimpse back to the 1970s, too.
“When we first arrived from the airport at the place where we were staying in Neukölln,” explains Benoît, “we looked up and there was immediately this sense of we knew that this is where we were going to be working for the next three weeks. And that was very important for the process.”
“We were in Neukölln as tourists,” adds Hannah. “We never lived there, and that affects your perspective.” I pick up on the touristic style of their photography, noting that their urban photos resemble the sorts of photos people take on their holidays, snapping an interesting building or street, only that Hannah and Benoît photograph much more mundane things like a parked trailer, or an ordinary house façade.
“Very unusual tourists,” she jokes, but it’s in these mundane details that the texture of the places becomes tangible. “And that’s the advantage we had as outsiders, we see things that people who live there don’t see.”
Most of the photos in the series were shot on medium and large format film in colour, however Hannah and Benoît decided to photocopy many of them in black and white to add what Benoît calls “layers of time.” Although all the images were taken in the same time, contrasting the crisp colour film photos with fuzzy photocopies creates the illusion of different eras, allowing the kind of imaginative time-travelling that the project aims for.
Benoît also explains that the black-and-white aesthetic fits with the time and the music. “It was the 1970s, the Cold War, and it matches the album cover and the city.” It’s almost like reminding the viewer that the photograph is not a perfect representation of reality. “It’s more abstract.”
Besides urban photography, one section of the project also depicts portraits of the people of Neukölln on the streets. These photos have a different quality to the rest of the project, feeling more intimate. “Most of the photos were made with tripods, you know, very traditional,” explains Benoît, “but for these, we used digital cameras to be quicker and to capture a very specific moment.” We return to the question of Bowie’s description of shackled Turks, and I ask how they approach the ethics of presenting people like this. For Hannah, it is again about avoiding storytelling. “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t impose a category onto these people. Yes, we made sure to have different groups represented, but they are not there to tell a story; they are there because they are part of the place.” Should someone read a narrative into the photographs, that’s their decision and not the photographer’s intention.
When the work veers into the political, it’s all about balance. Much of Hannah’s work deals with her own Iranian identity, and she has spent many years researching and producing work about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. “You can’t get much more political than that.” When she showed some of this work at the Polygon Gallery in Canada, the gallery reported that feedback was good and people were very interested. “But 10 percent were concerned. Half of them thought I was for the Iranian royal family, and half thought I was an Islamist. So I got it about right.”
Who’s Taking the Photo?
Another artist shown in the group exhibition has a style informed by his personal history. Raisan Hameed was born in Mosul, Iraq, where he studied painting. Friends encouraged him to put his artistic eye to work as a photojournalist for local news, starting his relationship with the camera by documenting people and events across the city.
He fled Iraq in 2015 after the outbreak of the war with IS. First fleeing to Turkey, Raisan quickly realised he had no future there and decided to go on toward Europe. “While fleeing I began reflecting about the medium of photography, because I saw many photographers – from CNN, BBC – who treated us, or the people who were there, as material. And they were just observers. I started thinking about this gesture, as a journalist, a white photographer, to go there, and only take photos. We didn’t speak; we didn’t have any real relationship.”
Eventually, Raisan made it to Germany and started to consider his future. “At first, I thought that I didn’t want to go back to painting, because that’s just showing a nice world of pretty pictures, nice colours, only flowers. But that’s not real, not after what I experienced through the Mediterranean. And photojournalism was the same thing, I didn’t ever want to be in the same position as those photographers I saw. So I decided to create a different kind of image, about the same, difficult themes – war, migration, flight, loss, because they were my experience – but not in a documentary style.”
Still working mainly with photography, Raisan’s practice brings sculpture and installation into his work in a way that challenges the presentation of war and migration in Europe. At EMOP, “do you have something to fight for?” at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, he’s exhibiting two works tied to his experience as a migrant coming to Europe. He makes flags from the silver and gold survival blankets handed out to migrants crossing the Mediterranean, printing texts in Arabic and photographs on them. Another work, Das Leiter, references the European border with a ladder propped up in the middle of the room while a loudspeaker announces in Arabic that anyone crossing the fence without permission may be shot.
“Even that piece,” Raisan explains, “began through photography, when I saw a video of how people were trying to climb over the border fence with ladders into Hungary, and were being shot at. Photography is always the point of departure.” The survival blankets have become a potent symbol of migration through the documentary photography that Raisan witnessed, and by turning them into flags, a political symbol, he gives them another layer of meaning.
Raisan also works with found images. At what stands between us, he’s showing a project that originated in the 2003 war in Iraq. Bombing caused old family photographs to fall from the walls of his family home. Their frames broke, the glass smashed, and the photos themselves were damaged too. They were kept, put in a box, and largely forgotten about, until Raisan had them sent to him in 2020. “My focus was on the damage, on the tears. I scanned small parts and then enlarged them, creating this abstraction.”
“I like it when there is a little bit of irritation in my work. I don’t want viewers to get a clear image, but to have to interpret and reflect, to have to put the fragments together like a puzzle. It’s a bit like a dream, you know? You wake up, and you really want to remember what you saw, and you can remember a bit, but not completely. There’s something mysterious, and in my work, it’s often about my own memories, so I also want the viewers to put these puzzles together themselves.”
Breaking apart the connection between the photograph and its subject shows how reality can be warped by photography, and so its political power. This drives Raisan’s practice, which is about countering the problematic visual culture that uses photography to promote discrimination. “I would like to know where the photos that were taken of me in 2015 are.”
“The question is who is photographing whom, and why? If we were to analyse these photographs we see in the media, in newspapers, and on TV, we would see that they are often taken by white photographers, and that they know very little about the people they are photographing or what happens to them. Some even show them in exhibitions and win prizes, but the depicted people know nothing about that.” They meanwhile are represented as different, foreign people to be feared, and this, in turn drives a dangerous, discriminatory politics.
How can this be countered? Raisan’s work doesn’t directly engage with these problematic images. Instead, he wants to show how it can be done better by making and spreading work that encourages us to engage with other cultures, and to come together for discussions about migration, war, and destruction that help us to learn from each other.
Exhibition Details
EMOP 2025 | What Stands Between Us. Photography as a Medium for Chronicling
Address: Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Opens: 27 February 2025, 7 PM | Runs: 28 February – 4 May 2025
EMOP 2025 | Do You Have Something to Fight For? 100 Years of Supporting and Shaping
Address: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kottbusser Strasse 10, 10999 Berlin
Opens: 27 February 2025, 7 PM | Runs: 28 February – 23 March 2025
Arist talk with Hannah Darabi and Benoît Grimbert, “Where Are We Now? Bowie Revisiting His Berlin Album, Us Revisiting Our Project.” With Jochen Becker.
Address: Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Friday, 28 February 2025, 3:00-3:45 PM
Artist talk with Raisan Hameed and Felipe Remero Beltrán, “A Time in Between: Photographic Practices and Experiences of Displacement.” With Nadine Isabelle Henrich.
Address: Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Saturday, 1 March 2025, 4:00-5:30 PM
About the Author
Quincy Mackay is a German-Australian culture journalist based in Berlin, covering arts and photography. He studied history, researching care work in the Algerian War of Independence and exploring the legacies of colonialism. He also works as a pedagogical tour guide, covering the history of the city of Berlin with a focus on the Berlin Wall.
Read more pieces in The Game Magazine:
Sarker Protick on Nature, Colonialism, and Change
Yalda Moaiery on the Struggles of Photojournalists Who Captured the Iranian Uprising
