Petra Wunderlich is known for a photographic practice that examines architectural form, material origin, and urban transformation through a restrained and methodical visual language. Working primarily in black and white, her photographs bring constructed spaces and geological sites into direct relation, offering a sober reflection on how cities are shaped by processes of extraction, construction, and erosion.
Educated at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, where she graduated in 1994, Wunderlich belongs to the generation that established conceptual photography as an autonomous artistic practice. While her work shares the Bechers’ formal rigor and frontal perspective, it departs from their typological systems. Rather than pursuing serial classification, Wunderlich introduces associative pairings—most notably between sacred architecture and stone quarries—that allow material origin, cultural meaning, and temporal change to coexist within a single body of work.
Her subject matter frequently oscillates between church façades and synagogues and the excavated landscapes from which architectural materials are drawn. These motifs are presented without monumentality or narrative, emphasizing structure, surface, and proportion. Wunderlich employs a consistent horizontal format, central perspective, and early morning light, photographing from an elevated vantage point to achieve clarity and even illumination. Human presence is deliberately excluded, allowing the architectural object to appear both specific and abstracted.
Materiality extends beyond the image to the print itself. Wunderlich works with analogue photography and prints on Japanese paper with a high silver content, producing a nuanced tonal range and pronounced surface depth. This approach connects her contemporary practice to earlier photographic traditions concerned with time, documentation, and transience. An early encounter with the work of Eugène Atget, discovered while studying painting in Paris, was formative in her transition to photography and continues to inform her sensibility.
Wunderlich lives and works in Berlin and New York.