BERLIN.- Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST has opened Elective Affinities, a group exhibition that brings together works by 24 photographers in a series of carefully constructed visual dialogues. The exhibition is on view in Berlin from July 4 through October 23, 2026.

Taking its title from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s idea of “elective affinities,” the exhibition explores the mysterious pull between images: the way photographs made by different artists, in different places and at different moments in time, can seem to recognize one another.

For the exhibition, Johanna Breede has arranged works in diptychs, placing photographs side by side to reveal unexpected echoes of form, light, gesture, atmosphere, and emotion. Many of the artists included never met. Some worked decades apart. Others come from entirely different cultural and geographic contexts. Yet, when their works are placed together, quiet correspondences begin to appear.

The exhibition includes photographs by Kathleen Alisch, Nomi Baumgartl, Sibylle Bergemann, Mariya Bilyan, Lillian Birnbaum, René Groebli, Jens Knigge, Koichiro Kurita, Machiko Kurita, Robert Lebeck, Herbert List, Isa Marcelli, Stefan Moses, Ulrike Ottinger, Marek Poźniak, Sheila Rock, Max Scheler, Songwen Sun-von Berg, Yuriko Takagi, Ayako Takaishi, Miriam Tölke, Donata Wenders, Wim Wenders, and Kurt Wyss.

The idea grew out of Breede’s long engagement with photography. Since her years leading the photography department at Villa Grisebach in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she has noticed certain images that seemed to belong together, not because of chronology or authorship, but because of a deeper visual kinship. In Elective Affinities, those remembered connections become the foundation of the show.

Among the pairings are rear-view portraits by René Groebli and Donata Wenders, both of which turn away from the face and focus instead on the neck, hair, fabric, and skin. The result is not distance, but intimacy. By refusing direct portraiture, the images create a sense of tenderness and vulnerability.





Elsewhere, botanical works by Ayako Takaishi and Songwen Sun-von Berg reduce plants to lines and signs, suggesting a shared meditative language close to calligraphy. Donata Wenders’ Red Shoes is paired with a hand-colored vintage photograph by Yuriko Takagi, creating a cinematic encounter in which red shoes emerge as small, charged centers of memory, fashion, and dream.

Landscapes by Jens Knigge and Koichiro Kurita speak to one another through emptiness and stillness, with solitary trees placed against open space. Mirror images by Max Scheler and Lillian Birnbaum show women caught in moments of self-reflection, turning the mirror into a site of questioning rather than vanity. In another pairing, works by Miriam Tölke and Isa Marcelli blur faces, branches, water, and shadow until human presence and nature seem to merge.

What makes the exhibition compelling is its refusal to over-explain. The photographs are not arranged to illustrate a theme in a literal way. Instead, Breede allows them to meet, and then gives viewers the space to notice what happens between them.

Elective Affinities becomes, in this sense, an exhibition about recognition: the sudden feeling that two images, separated by time and circumstance, have somehow been waiting for one another. It suggests that photographs can carry their own memory, and that visual forms sometimes return across generations like echoes.

At its heart, the show is a curatorial love letter to the act of looking closely. It invites visitors to slow down, compare, sense, and discover the small resonances that emerge when images are allowed to face one another.