Anja Weber will become professor of photography at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart

In the winter semester of 2022–2023, renowned photographer Anja Weber will take over as the program’s photography professor. She believes that critical thinking and an awareness of design as a tool with social relevance are essential skills for designers of the future. She wants to encourage pupils to consider their own work seriously and to develop self-reflection skills.

Since 1998, Anja Weber has worked for publishing houses, organizations, artists, and businesses. Her portraits and reportages look at contemporary sociopolitical circumstances and critically analyze image creation techniques. Anja Weber conducts study on representation, identity, and place in her artistic endeavors, as well as staging and the assertion of reality in photographic images. She produces photographic series and multi-media projects in conjunction with actors from the fields of architecture, performance, and music. Anja Weber completed studies in film/video and photography at Dortmund, Exeter, and New York. She studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the International Center of Photography and New York University. She was a photography instructor at the German University in Cairo from 2017 to 2019.

At the Merz Akademie, Anja Weber will be a professor of visual communication starting in the winter semester of 2022/23. “Photography has a utopian power. It can create fantastic visual worlds or depict realities of life that are unseen. I want to enable students to help shape an inclusive and solidary society as designers,” says Anja Weber, describing her teaching approach. “The Merz Akademie serves as an open space for experimentation and exploring one’s own limits.”

Students in all areas of the bachelor’s degree program in design, art, and media—crossmedia publication, film and video, new media, and visual communication—are targeted by the photography/image course that the professorship offers.

A non-profit, nationally certified university of applied art, design, and media, Merz Akademie was established in 1918. Merz Akademie, which combines aspects of a traditional art academy, a technical college, and a humanities department, offers itself as a distinctive location for learning with a strong interest in the humanities, social and cultural studies, design, art, and technology. It intends to make it easier for design authors to receive a professional education and an academic education so they are better equipped to establish standards for a profession that is always evolving.