Jonas Feige

A dark butterfly rests on a pale blue surface against a white textured background.
Deep shadow cast by a vertically standing rock.
A person's leg in black tights emerging from white bedding against a white curtain backdrop.
High-contrast black and white silhouette of leaves against a bright background.
A trash container with a black circular hole in its center.
Close-up of a fabric opening with serrated edges against draped textiles in black and white.
Black and white photograph of geometric sculptural forms with foliage overhead.
Black and white photograph of a leaf with holes in it hanging from a branch among blurred foliage.

Everything, everything

Photographed, a familiar thing can become strange. The image holds not what the thing had always seemed, but what it briefly became: some­thing harder to name, no longer insisting on itself.

These photographs are a collection of such moments, built over ten years: not of things themselves, but of their appearances flowing into each other.

Publication forthcoming in 2027

Large oval tunnel opening through textured stone walls in black and white.
A dark tunnel entrance carved through stone with textured walls and a paved ground below.
View through a circular tunnel opening onto a trees in summer.
A figure sits within a large concrete tunnel, framed by the circular opening ahead in black and white.
Narrow passageway between weathered stone walls with light streaming through, black and white photograph. A narrow beam of light cuts through a shadowed stone corridor, creating a sharp geometric contrast between light and dark surfaces.
View through a stone tunnel to a winter park with bare trees and people by water.
A stark white stone passageway with a dark oval opening in the center wall.
Three people stand inside a large stone tunnel, looking toward the bright opening ahead framing trees and landscape beyond.
A solitary figure stands within a stone tunnel, viewed from inside looking toward distant light.
Stone bridge with circular opening spanning calm water, lined with tall trees in black and white.

Weimar

In Weimar, a city where history has been narrated so thoroughly that most places seem to know exactly what they mean, there is an opening in the ma­son­ry of the Schloss­brücke that carries no plaque, no inscription, no prescribed meaning. Some­thing mysterious emanates from it, something that draws me back again and again, and the young people who linger there as if momentarily occupying a gap in space and time.

Goethe and the Bauhaus, the first German democracy and Buchenwald: Weimar's official sites carry stories so thoroughly settled they can feel sealed shut. The opening in the bridge is an opening in this sense too: a space where over-determined histories give way to something alive. The photographs are the record of returning over several years to watch how the light shifts, the people change and the space remakes itself.

A narrow trench or ravine with steep earthen walls stretches into the distance in black and white.
Weathered rock formations with sparse grass tufts in black and white.
Narrow passage between two white stone walls under bright sky, creating stark contrast and deep shadow. A narrow trench with steep earthen walls leads toward a distant sky with white clouds and sparse vegetation visible at the top.
Weathered stone surface with deep grooves and sparse vegetation in black and white.
A narrow rocky crevasse with grass growing between weathered stone walls under overcast sky.
Deep furrow in plowed earth stretches toward distant horizon in black and white.
Deep crevasse or trench with dark shadows and sparse vegetation visible at the edge.
Weathered concrete surface with deep pores and erosion marks in black and white.
A trench being dug by an industrial jackhammer.
Weathered stone block with surface texture against white wall and gravel ground.

As Explained Elsewhere

A track is usually evidence of passage: some­thing moved here, recently enough that the mark persists. Malta's cart ruts complicate this: grooves worn or cut into the island's limestone, paired tracks that converge and diverge without apparent logic, surviving in fields, on clifftops, beneath roads. No one knows how they were made, or why. Having outlived all memory, the ruts exist now as pure form: lines still legible but no longer readable.

The work follows these ruts alongside Malta's urban surfaces, where new construction layers over old ground and development accumulates over whatever was there before. Geographically distinct, both sets of images share the same preoccupation: what persists after purpose has been forgotten, after a trace has been detached from its history and become available for projection and speculation.

with the support of Cultures Moves Europe

A Narrow Foothold title page on black background with gray text.
A silhouetted figure appears behind frosted glass against a cloudy sky, creating an abstract and atmospheric composition.
Open book with blank left page and grayscale architectural photograph on right page.
Black and white photograph of industrial pipes with bright sunlight peering through.
Open book with blank left page and grayscale architectural photograph on right page.
Open book displaying two black and white photographs: a person drawing on the left and a bird's eye view of a river on the right.
White abstract shapes painted on dark asphalt ground.
Black and white photograph of an urban street with buildings and a parked car, mounted on a white page in an open book.
Open book spread with white text on black pages displaying a list of numbered references or footnotes.
Open book displaying black and white architectural photograph with geometric shapes and urban elements.
Open book with two black and white photographs on white pages, displayed against gray background.
White organic lines on a brick a wall.
Open book showing blank left page and right page with black and white photograph of urban vegetation.
Black and white photograph of a pedestrian overpath.
Open book displaying two black and white photographs: a close-up of hands on the left, vertical lines on the right.

A Narrow Foothold

German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s monumental work the Arcades Project—which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1940—represents both a treatise on the labyrinthine nature of the modern city and the realization of his dream of a book without authorship, composed almost entirely of quotations drawn from a wide range of sources. Taking their mutual appreciation for these aspects of Benjamin’s work as their starting point, friends and photographers Jonas Feige (Germany) and Alan Huck (United States) sorted through their archives of orphaned images in order to assemble a collective portrait of an anonymous city—one composed of severe geometric forms, vague symbols, and the spectral traces of a human presence. Intentionally trying to dissolve any sense of individual authorship, the two looked to Benjamin as their methodological guide, reminding them that “an enigma is a fragment that, together with another, matching fragment, makes up a whole.”

Open book spread with abstract architectural image on left and classical engraving on right.
Open book spread with blank left page and black and white photograph of stairs carved into a mountain on right page.
A white house with boarded windows and smoke damage above them in black and white.
Dark oval shape on light ground with curved white pathways separating dark soil patches.
Misty forest landscape with fallen logs spread across two facing pages of an open book.
Multiple translucent mesh panels suspended over earthen ground near a concrete structure.
Open book spread with two black and white artworks: left page shows a figure drawing, right page displays abstract graffiti-like marks and text.
Open book displaying a black and white photograph of a large open space covered with cobblestone.
A stark black and white photograph of a house with geometric angles casting dramatic shadows on a white wall.
Open book showing blank left page and black and white photograph on right page of a baroque mirror and paintings of royalty in its reflection.
Open book displaying two black and white architectural photographs side by side.
Metal mesh protecting an urban balcony, reminiscent of a human figure.
Open book publication displaying black and white photograph of angular architectural form against white page.
Open book with blank left page and black and white photograph of a wooden plank leading over a creek on right.
A large dark space looms behind barbed wire lines in this black and white photograph.
Bare tree stands alone in vast, flat agricultural landscape, black and white photograph.
Open book displaying black and white landscape photograph of open landscape with large shadows across two pages.

This Soil We Have Created For Ourselves

This Soil looks at Germany as a landscape haunted by its own history. The project traces the echoes of bygone myths, ideologies, and utopias through sites of memory, museums, and monuments, where the past is preserved, shaped, and presented as history, and through the everyday surroundings of German towns and villages.

At a time when calls for national identity and a clearly defined Heimat have grown louder, the work confronts the nationalist myth of a sacred homeland: the notion, common to all nationalisms, that a land has belonged to a people since time immemorial. The shadows of the past take on new form here, encroaching, unresolved, never fully closed. The project asks what this complicated relationship to history means for the present, and what potential it holds for Germany's future.

“This Soil is an investigation of sites of memory and yet its strength lies in not relying on a linear re-telling of events. It invites us to sense the significance of what we see before us and in doing so, attempts to strike a difficult balance between bringing attention to Germany’s dark past, while also refusing to give it honour or pay homage.” — Lucy Rogers, C4 Journal

“Feige's book is a reminder that reminders are not history. They are propositions that wrangle us back from the complacency of believing that we understand history when it emerges like another dirty phoenix with a yearning for absolutes when we expect it least but subconsciously desire it the most.” — Brad Feuerhelm on American Suburb X/Patreon

published by Kominek Books in 2021

A hardcover book with a dark spine lies at an angle on a white surface, displaying a lush forest photograph on its cover.
Historic colonial buildings illuminated at dusk, one with a palm tree in foreground.
Nicolas Zenker displaying arm tattoo of his family name on a patterned sofa.
Open book showing black and white historical photographs on left page and green leaves with red spots on right page.
An open book spread showing a swampy forest scene on the left and a person in light clothing exploring dense vegetation on the right.
Light blue wall with portrait photographs, windows showing dense green foliage, and a sofa in foreground.
Open book displaying two photographs: left page shows a framed portrait with tangled wires; right page shows a wooden structure with corrugated metal roof.
Palm fronds silhouetted against warm orange sky with white raindrops falling in the foreground.
Open book showing text on left page and photograph of weathered concrete columns and floor on right.
Open book spread showing a sunset silhouette of a palm tree on the left and a close-up of a felled palm tree on the right.
Two black and white historical portrait photographs on left page; color portrait of African woman wearing white headwrap and blue garment on right page.
A sparse bedroom with a metal bed frame, wooden desk, and green fabric canopy against white walls decorated with posters and photographs.
Young man in white tank top and pink pants leaning against a tombstone with cross.
Open book spread with data tables on left pages and photograph of a labeled specimen jar on right page.
Open book displaying a detailed bird illustration on the left and four preserved green parakeets with specimen labels on the right.
Open book spread with watercolor bird on left page and red cardinal picture on right page.

Zenker

In 1889, Georg August Zenker, a gardener and botanist from Leipzig, took charge of the Jaunde (present-day Yaoundé) research station in the German colony of Kamerun. After six years’ tenure, Zenker was summarily relieved of his duties. He was said to be leading a polygamous life at the station with several African women, some of whom had borne him children. Zenker left the country, only to return soon afterwards as a private citizen. He settled with his family (a woman from Dahomé and five children) in Bipindi, deep in the Kamerun jungle, where he built Bipindihof, a German colonial-style house and vast cocoa, rubber and banana plantations. The mainstay of his livelihood, however, consisted in collecting copious botanical and zoological specimens as well as ethnographic objects for German museums. Zenker’s thought and actions were, to be sure, heavily influenced by the colonial mindset. But on a number of occasions he clearly opposed the colonialist and militaristic practices of his superiors and other German countrymen. He died in 1922 and was buried on the grounds of his Bipindihof. Zenker’s descendants live widely dispersed in Cameroon and Europe today, but most of them still regard the now crumbling Bipindihof as the cradle of the family.

Yana Wernicke and Jonas Feige traveled to the present-day Republic of Cameroon several times for this photographic essay in order to retrace Zenker’s life there and portray his descendants. By bringing together recovered letters, photographs, drawings and paintings as well as interviews with Zenker’s descendants, they form a portrait of Georg August Zenker that emphasizes the complexity of his character and the complicated legacy he left behind.

Jonas Feige is a photographer based near Frankfurt am Main. His work combines documentary inquiry with a lasting interest in the relationship between photography and human perception. Projects often start from direct observation, then take an oblique approach to their subject. Time runs through much of what he does, both as subject and method: work develops over years, through repeated visits to the same places and people.

His projects have dealt with German colonial history in Cameroon, sites of memory and the nationalist myth of a sacred homeland, and ancient cart ruts in Malta as a way of exploring deep time and the erosion of traces. His books have been published by Edition Patrick Frey, Kominek Books, and Another Earth.

He is currently developing an ongoing series in Weimar and a book approaching the photographer as a collector of appearances, planned for publication in 2027.

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