Norman Behrendt / Germany
Photo location: Azerbaijan, Georgia
Norman Behrendt, born 1981 in former East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, is a German photographer based in Berlin. He studied graphic design and photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam and majored in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree. He led several photography workshops at the f/16 School for Photography in Berlin where he supported young nonprofessionals to find their own visual language.
In his early childhood, he experienced the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification. This memorable event shaped his awareness for the social and political developments in Europe caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Behrendt is mainly known for his photographs of Berlin’s graffiti writers and his accompanying and repeatedly rewarded photobook ‘burning down the house, 2007 – 2012’. In 2013, this project won the first prize at the 6th Fotobook Dummy Award in Kassel and got an appreciation at the ’10th Aenne-Biermann-Prize’ for contemporary German photography in Gera. It was also shown in solo exhibitions in Belgium and Germany and in several group shows in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Lithuania, Ukraine and Ireland.
Behrendt focusses on personal projects. His photographic work mainly deals with the individual, cultural and political significance of places and the people defining them. Within this framework Behrendt’s work circulates on the boundaries between documentary and conceptual photography.