ZEITmagazin
Every Monday in the lead up to this year’s Modern Magazine conference we’re inviting a different speaker from the line-up to introduce a spread from the most recent issue of their magazine.
Today we’re catching up with Christoph Amend, editor-in-chief of the unbeatable German newspaper supplement ZEITmagazin. At ModMag, Christoph will be explaining how he and creative director Mirko Borsche regularly subvert the traditions of the weekly newspaper magazine.
‘ZEITmagazin is the magazine of Germany’s biggest quality paper DIE ZEIT,’ explains Christoph, ‘We define the magazine as “the emotional side” of the rather analytical DIE ZEIT.’
‘I wanted to go to Las Vegas to discover the myth’
The latest issue is their annual photography special (above).
‘Photography plays a major part in each issue of ZEITmagazin. For us photographers and illustrators are authors, just like reporters and columnists are. In fact we’ve been running a weekly photography column for quite a few years. Each year we dedicate it to one photographer, so it’s 52 columns each year. In 2016 Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari have taken over, before them we welcomed Juergen Teller, Paolo Pellegrin, Lina Scheynius and the late Daniel Josefsohn.
‘Once a year we dedicate a special issue issue to the work of one upcoming photographer. This year we asked Stefanie Moshammer from Vienna.’
‘Andreas Wellnitz, our photography consultant, had introduced me to the work of Stefanie nearly a year ago, so we got in touch and when Stefanie told me she would spend some time in Rio this spring we published her first story for us just before the beginning of the Olympics.
‘She had also mentioned that she had been working on another project. When she had spent time in Las Vegas last year a stranger had knocked on the door of her department telling her he was looking for his former girlfriend. A few days later the stranger sent her a love letter asking her to spend her life with him. The letter was addressed to “the Austrian girl”. She was frightened but she came up with the idea of producing a piece of work about this experience. When she told me about it, I was hooked. The work is called “I can be her”, it’s a fascinating mix of documentary and artistic photography. So this is basically how it became our photography issue for 2016.’
We’re looking forward to hearing more from Christoph at ModMag16 on 27 October.