Dieter Appelt

Since the 1960s, Berlin-born artist Dieter Appelt (b. 1935) has traced the losses of modern society through his camera lens. The trained musician and opera singer discovered photography as a means of reconnecting with nature, mythology, and mortality. In countless activities that he documented with his camera, Appelt incorporates his own body into the images with a poetic approach, exploring its fragility and relationship with nature. Time and again, he circles around existential questions of life and death, memory and recurrence.
The Lindenau Museum in Altenburg is honoring Dieter Appelt with the 2025 Gerhard Altenbourg Prize for his life’s work and has dedicated an exhibition to him. This publication provides an extensive and profound insight into Appelt’s artistic development and, in addition to important projects and large-scale series of photographs, also documents drawings, objects, and films from the artist’s oeuvre.