Philipp Kahler. From Abstract Structure to Physical Artwork
Philipp Kahler. From Abstract Structure to Physical Artwork
For around thirty years, Philipp Kahler worked in a world of numbers, charts, patterns and algorithms. As a trader in the stock and commodity markets, he operated within a reality with very concrete consequences, yet one that remained largely abstract. After many years, he began to feel the need to create something with a physical presence. Today he creates large-scale images of architecture on ceramic tiles coated with cyanotype emulsion.
At first glance, there could hardly be a greater contrast between his former and current work. Yet the two are connected by the way he sees. The artist has not abandoned his interest in structure, regularity and repetition. He has carried these concerns from the abstract world of finance into architecture and then given them physical form. This movement, from abstract structure to physical artwork and from the physical artwork back to structure, provides an important key to understanding his practice.
From the world of numbers to the world of things
Philipp Kahler grew up in a family of chemists and learned darkroom photography from his father and grandfather. At first, however, he was not particularly interested in the classical ideal of the perfect photographic print. During his university years, Lomo cameras opened up a different way of thinking about photography, one less bound by traditional rules. He later became interested in pinhole photography and began building cameras himself, eventually constructing a large-format box camera measuring 50 × 40 cm. Photography gradually became, for him, more than the moment of pressing the shutter. It became a process that had to be planned and controlled from the preparation of the material to the physical form of the finished work.¹
This need for control helps explain the photographer's relationship with historical photographic processes. He is not interested in them simply as old techniques or visual styles. What matters is the possibility of shaping the different stages of the process himself. Photographing, preparing the material, chemical processing and determining the final form of the print all belong to the same creative process. A turning point came about two years ago, after Philipp Kahler returned from a period of volunteer work in Auroville, India. He says that he had begun looking for something physical and tangible in his work. When he discovered that his early cyanotypes on paper were deteriorating, he abandoned the standard photographic paper and turned to ceramics. This was not simply a response to a technical problem. It was also a move from a world of abstract values toward objects with their own surface, weight and material presence.¹
This approach resonates with a broader understanding of photography as an object. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart have argued that photographs should be considered not only as images but also as things that exist in time and space, with material properties that influence how they function and how they are understood.² Geoffrey Batchen has similarly emphasized the importance of photographic materiality and the processes through which photographs come into being.³ In the work of Philipp Kahler, this perspective becomes particularly tangible. Materiality is not a secondary quality waiting to be discovered in the photograph. It is part of the work from the beginning.
Architecture, blueprint and material
The artist looks at the city primarily through structure. In his answers, he speaks of patterns, algorithms, rhythm and repetition. A brick wall can appeal to him because it reveals a mathematical order. The same applies to regular façades, repeated window modules and prefabricated structures. Among the images and ideas that have influenced him, Philipp Kahler mentions the simple equation ax=b and the monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he associates with geometric perfection combined with mystery.¹
His interest, then, is not simply a fascination with Brutalism or Modernism as architectural styles. The photographer sees architecture as a system. He also recognizes that three decades in financial markets trained him to look for patterns, relationships and repetition. That way of seeing has become part of how he approaches the city.¹ This is where cyanotype acquires a particular significance. John Herschel developed the process in 1842. Anna Atkins began using it the following year to produce botanical images, and later in the nineteenth century cyanotype became an important method for reproducing technical drawings, including architectural and engineering plans. Its association with these applications eventually became closely linked to the term blueprint.⁴
For Philipp Kahler, the blueprint is more than a historical reference. Architecture begins as a design, an abstract arrangement of lines, proportions, modules and functions, and only later becomes a physical building. The photographer takes the next step: he transforms the finished structure into an image and then gives that image a material presence of its own.
This is not simply a return to the ideal plan. Philipp Kahler emphasizes that his ceramic tableaus show the encounter between architectural ideal and physical reality: time, weather, dirt, ageing and the building's relationship with its surroundings.¹ Geometry that begins as an ordered concept therefore meets everything that cannot be fully controlled. Ceramic is central to this idea. The artist does not regard it as a neutral substrate. The material should relate to what is being depicted. A prefabricated building, industrial plant or power station transferred onto a cold, industrial ceramic surface creates, in his view, a meaningful relationship between subject and material. At the same time, the hand-prepared gelatin layer introduces an element of human touch into an otherwise industrial surface.¹
The material represented and the material carrying the image therefore begin to reinforce one another. The ceramic tile is no longer simply where the photograph happens to exist. It becomes part of what the work means. This connects closely with the wider discussion of photography's materiality. Geoff Bender and Rasmus R. Simonsen have shown how material, process and photographic object remain closely intertwined.⁵ David LaRocca, writing about cyanotype in relation to digital media, has likewise examined the significance of the cyanotype as a material photographic object.⁶ The artist takes this idea into his own practice in a particularly direct way.
The photograph begins to acquire some of the qualities of architecture itself. It has a specific scale, modular construction, surface and weight. A single ceramic tile is only a fragment, rather like a single tessera in a mosaic. The larger composition reveals the complete image. At the same time, the joints between the tiles introduce a second geometric grid, laid over the structure of the photographed building.¹
The polyptych is therefore not simply a way of making the photograph larger. It becomes another architectural layer within the work. The building has modules, the image has modules, and the ceramic tiles give that structure physical weight. As the tableau grows, so does its mass, reinforcing the scale and monumentality of the structures being depicted.¹
Control, fractures, gilding and erasure
A structure of this kind requires an extraordinary degree of consistency. Small differences in the thickness of the emulsion can produce differences in the blue tones that may go unnoticed on a single tile but immediately disrupt the unity of a large tableau. Manual coating proved too imprecise, so Philipp Kahler spent almost a year developing his own method for applying the emulsion evenly by spinning.¹
Yet he does not regard technical precision as an artistic value in itself. It is a prerequisite for making the work. For the artist, control of the process is a tool rather than the artwork itself. He compares the situation to a painter who must control the brush before being able to make the painting he has in mind.¹
That distinction is important. The purpose of control is not to eliminate experimentation, but to make deliberate intervention possible. Philipp Kahler plans to deliberately fracture ceramic tiles and emphasize the resulting cracks with gold, either placed beneath the fractures or along their edges. He does not regard this as destroying the work. It is intended as part of the original conception. Gold refers to capital, which on the one hand enables the construction of monumental structures, while on the other contributes to the transformation of urban space. In this context, the photographer points to Berlin, rising rents and the displacement of established communities.¹
The fracture thus becomes a physical trace of a force that would otherwise remain invisible. An abstract economic structure acquires a material form across the photographic image of a building. There is another idea that pushes the work further: selective erasure. Philipp Kahler refers to the Buddhist sand mandala, but he is not interested in simply making the entire image disappear. What interests him is the deliberate removal of a particular part of the image, such as a building that has since been demolished.¹ In such a case, absence becomes a form of information. The disappearance of the image corresponds to the disappearance of its physical counterpart.
This creates an intriguing tension. Ceramic suggests permanence, as does monumental architecture, yet the finished work can be deliberately altered and its ceramic structure disrupted or partially removed. Philipp Kahler is not proposing an artwork that remains permanently unfinished, however. While the work is in his studio, he can alter and refine it. Fracturing, gilding and erasure are all part of the planned process. Once the work is completed, framed and hung on the wall, that process comes to an end.¹ The distinction matters because the artist does not reject the idea of a finished artwork. Instead, he extends the point at which the work becomes finished. The photograph is not necessarily complete when the photographic image first appears. It may still pass through further stages before reaching its final form.
From system to matter
At this point, three seemingly distant areas of Philipp Kahler's life, his work in financial markets, architecture and photography, begin to form a coherent whole.
In the financial world, he was interested in patterns, relationships, structures and repetition. In architecture, he found a physical equivalent of those ideas. He then transformed those structures into photographs and the photographs into ceramic objects. An abstract way of seeing has been carried through the entire process of making until it becomes a thing. Philipp Kahler did not leave abstraction behind. He brought its logic with him into photography.¹
That is why the description “cyanotype on ceramic” does not fully capture his work. It tells us how the image was made, but says little about why it was made in this particular way. In the artist's practice, the history of cyanotype leads to the blueprint, the blueprint to architecture, architecture to a modular image structure, and ceramic gives that structure its own surface, scale and weight. Fracturing, gilding and erasure become further ways of working with the same underlying structure. In this respect, his practice belongs to a broader contemporary understanding of photography as a material object. The question is no longer only what a photograph represents, but also what kind of thing it is, how it was made and how its physical properties contribute to its meaning.² ³
Just as important is what the photographer does not expect from the viewer. He does not assume that viewers need to understand the chemistry of cyanotype or be interested in the technical process of applying emulsion. Those details matter primarily to people working with alternative photographic processes. What he wants is for viewers to slow down and look at the architecture itself, its rhythm and its mathematical order. He hopes that Brutalist and prefabricated buildings will not be seen only as cold or dystopian structures, but also as remarkable feats of engineering and expressions of human purpose.¹ Photography therefore becomes a way of changing how we look. The viewer may begin with a particular building, notice its modules and repetition, and then discover that the same order has been carried into the ceramic object.
The process begins with an abstract structure, passes through architecture and photography, and ends as a physical thing. It can then be reversed, as the object leads the viewer back toward the structure and the way of seeing that produced it. This, to me, is the most interesting aspect of Philipp Kahler's practice. He does not use a historical photographic process simply to recreate an earlier form of photography, nor does he make the technique itself the subject. Cyanotype gives him a way to carry his particular way of thinking into matter. From numbers to architecture, from architecture to image, from image to ceramic, and from ceramic back to structure.
Photography here is not simply an image of architecture. It becomes a material equivalent of the way Philipp Kahler sees architecture. That is why his work offers such an interesting example of how a historical photographic process can be used not to reconstruct the past, but to develop a contemporary reflection on the image, materiality and the act of seeing.
Notes
Philipp Kahler, responses to questions concerning his photographic practice, professional background, use of cyanotype and ceramics, architectural work, polyptychs, fractures, erasure and artistic concept, private correspondence with the author, 2026.
E. Edwards, J. Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London–New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–15.
G. Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Cambridge, Mass.–London: The MIT Press, 2001.
M. Ware, “A Blueprint for Conserving Cyanotypes”, Topics in Photographic Preservation, vol. 10, 2003, pp. 2–18.
G. Bender, R. R. Simonsen (eds.), Photography’s Materialities: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Nineteenth Century, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021, pp. 9–22.
D. LaRocca, “Object Lessons: What Cyanotypes Teach Us About Digital Media”, in: G. Bender, R. R. Simonsen (eds.), Photography’s Materialities: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Nineteenth Century, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021, pp. 207–234.
