Gottfried Jäger and the Founders of the Generative Photography

Sous les Étoiles Gallery is pleased to present Gottfried Jäger and the Precursors of the Generative Photography, an exhibition on view from January 21 to April 10, 2026. The exhibition brings together key works by early pioneers whose systematic and rule-based approaches laid the foundations of generative photography: Herbert W. Franke, Heinz Hajek – Halke, Heinrich Heidersberger, Roger Humbert, Peter Keetman, Hein Gravenhorst, Karl Martin Holzhäuser and Carl Strüwe among others.

A special focus is also dedicated to the pinhole structures, Gottfried Jäger’s most iconic and influential series.

Generative photography emerged in the mid-twentieth century as photographers began to move away from the notion of the decisive moment in favor of systems, rules, and repetition. Rather than composing a single expressive image, these artists devised procedures capable of producing photographic series through controlled variation. By limiting personal choice and emphasizing process, they transformed the camera into a generative tool, capable of producing images through predefined conditions rather than intuition alone.

Generative photography did not originate with computers, but with a fundamental rethinking of photographic authorship. In the decades following World War II, a number of photographers began to challenge the idea of the photograph as a singular, expressive act. Instead, they developed image-making processes based on rules, repetition, and systematic variation, allowing form to emerge from structure.

Artists such as Roger Humbert and Carl Strüwe pursued abstraction through sustained visual investigation, often isolating natural or material forms until they became autonomous visual systems. Heinrich Heidersberger’s Rhythmograms, produced through precisely controlled light movement and exposure, exemplify a mechanical and time-based generation of form. Peter Keetman’s photographs from the Volkswagen factory transformed industrial reality into serial configurations governed by self-imposed constraints, while Hein Gravenhorst explored typology and sequence as organizing principles.

What unites these practices is a decisive shift away from photographic subjectivity toward procedural authorship. The photographer no longer selects a single image but designs a framework within which images are generated. This approach aligns photography with developments in concrete art, serial music, and later computer-based generative art. In 1968, Gottfried Jäger gave this tendency a name—Generative Fotografie—and provided its theoretical articulation. Yet the works presented in this exhibition demonstrate that generative photography was already well established as a practice. These early explorations reveal photography as a medium capable of producing images not only through seeing, but through systems that see for us.

The exhibition is also devoted to the pinhole structures, a central and defining body of work by Gottfried Jäger. Created between 1967 and 1973 using a self-made multi-pinhole camera (camera obscura), this series represents the culmination of Jäger’s early investigations into generative photography. Through strict seriality and minimal optical conditions, they reveals photography at its most fundamental level: not as representation, but as a system capable of generating form through light, time, and structure.

January 24 – April 11, 2026

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