Manfred Paul – Verena – Lebenszeichen, 1971–2024

Over five decades, Manfred Paul has repeatedly photographed his wife Verena, building a body of work shaped by their life together but resistant to a single narrative. Working in silver gelatin, he uses the full tonal range of black and white to articulate light, shadow and surface with remarkable precision. Verena appears giving birth, as a prima ballerina of the Dresden State Ballet, an artist, a model, a lover and Paul’s counterpart. Photographs from different periods, moods and moments preserve the discontinuities between these roles. Describing photographs as “suspended time”, Paul treats photography as a practice of looking: a means, in his words, “to find a form” for an experience that cannot be made coherent.

Manfred Paul’s photography attends to the fragile and often overlooked dimensions of everyday life. Working across portraiture, still life and urban imagery, he has developed a visual language marked by restraint, precision, and a contained tension. His images engage with transience, memory, and the passage of time, capturing moments that resist narrative resolution. Balancing formal clarity with emotional depth, his practice reveals the vulnerability and dignity of his subjects, articulating a sustained reflection on presence, absence and the subtle atmospheres that shape human experience.