Previously featuredThuan Anh Nguyen, A Veil of Colour› Featured artist · Academy student
Andrea Armbrüster
Saarbrücken, Germany
A photographer who lets the city move. In City Life, streets, people and colour are drawn out into long vertical strokes, until a crowded pavement reads less like a record of a place and more like the feeling of standing in it.
Andrea is one of the very first students of the Academy, taught live in the classroom long before our courses came online. Below, her series City Life, in seven pictures.
The moment when something opens up and begins to carry a feeling or meaning of its own is what keeps me photographing.
Andrea Armbrüster
The series
City Life
Metropolitan life as an interplay of joy, energy and tension. People, movement, colour and urban structures interweave within the frame, carrying the city’s richness and vitality alongside its strain and anonymity.
In Andrea’s words, “With City Life, I reflect on the delicate balance between the vibrancy, diversity and potential of urban life and the demands and challenges inherent in it.”Click any picture to see it larger
From our curator
Why we chose this work
What stopped us was how much of the city survives the movement. Every picture in City Life has been pulled into long vertical strokes, and yet you still know exactly where you are standing. A doorway, a parked car, a yellow awning, a crowd gathered on a pavement. The street is never lost, it has simply been loosened, so you feel the place before you read it.
Then there is the colour. Andrea lets the city’s own colour do the work, a band of yellow, a flash of orange, a pink sign high in the frame, and places it so carefully that the pictures stay calm even when the street is crowded. People become upright marks among the buildings, close together and completely anonymous, which is exactly the tension the series is about.
As for how these pictures come to be, Andrea is known for her experimentation, and she prefers to keep a little mystery about her process. We think that is exactly right. What matters is what the work does, and City Life is deeply emotive, the joy and the strain of a busy street held in the same frame. It begins with a real street on a real day and simply refuses to stop there, and that is why it is here.
The curator, Art Photography Academy
Andrea ArmbrüsterThe artist
Photography begins with looking
Andrea is a photographer based in Saarbrücken, in Germany, and her work moves between two ways of seeing. At a distance she observes, waits and selects, giving herself the space to understand a scene before deciding what matters. In her abstract work she goes the other way, coming closer and closer until the context begins to disappear.
Over time she has become less interested in photography as a record of what she has seen, and more interested in what an image can become through the way she sees it. Working at times in the documentary tradition keeps her grounded in reality, while fine art photography lets the picture move beyond it.
She is also one of the very first students of the Art Photography Academy. Andrea learned in the classroom, in our live classes, long before the courses came online, and experimentation has been part of her work ever since.
“What matters to me is whether an image creates a sense of recognition, uncertainty, tension, or quietness, something that makes me want to look again.”
Our featured artists
Previously featured
Every few months our curator chooses an Academy student whose work deserves a wider audience. Each one keeps a page of their own.
Maryland, United StatesThuan Anh NguyenA Veil of ColourSee the featureStart your own body of work
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