FRED SPIES

Fred Spies is a German artist and photographer based in Berlin. He grew up in Munich during the decades of post-war reconstruction — a period in which the rebuilt and the residual existed side by side, and in which the visible surface of things was rarely the whole story.

His formation as a photographer began in the mid-1980s through apprenticeships with established practitioners across Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — moving between portrait, fashion, large-format, and commercial work, and absorbing the distinct visual cultures of each city. By the late 1990s he had established an independent practice, working across Europe and the United States within the fashion industry for the better part of two decades.

In 2020, Spies returned to a more purely artistic practice — one concerned less with image-making as production and more with photography as a mode of inquiry. His ongoing series Below Surface emerged from this shift: a sustained investigation into perception, materiality, and the relationship between human attention and the living systems that surround us. Working with an iPhone X as a deliberate instrument of directness, he transforms intimate observations of water, skin, light, and organic matter into large-scale works that invite a slower, more contemplative form of looking.

His practice draws on ecology, the philosophy of perception, and the thinking of Bruno Latour — particularly the understanding that matter is not passive, and that the boundary between the technological and the organic is far less stable than we tend to assume.