Bettina von Zwehl


Bettina von Zwehl is a German photographer who lives and works in London. She is known for her "subtle and unnerving" portrait photography.

Career

Von Zwehl was born in Munich and studied in London, receiving a BA in Photography from the London College of Printing and an MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
She began making portraits as a student at the Royal College of Art, using a 19th-century methodology that she encountered as a photographer's assistant in Rome, working on 10" x 8" film with a large-plate camera. Most of her work has been in the studio. Reviews of her early work often commented on its conceptual framing and the depiction of subjects in unusual physical or emotional circumstances, with an increased degree of vulnerability. At the same time, she has also been interested in profile photography. Citing the influence of Renaissance painting, she calls the profile portrait "one of the most powerful ways of representing a person."
In 2010 she was commissioned to take a series of outdoor portraits of athletes and paralympians preparing for the 2012 London Olympics. Recently she has been invited to create works in reaction to the collections of several museums, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Holburne Museum and the Freud Museum. In 2014 she collaborated with her friend and fellow artist Sophy Rickett on a project reacting to an album from the Sir Benjamin Stone Archive at the Library of Birmingham.
She was Artist in Residence for 6 months in 2011 at the V&A and Artist in Residence for 5 months in 2013–2014 at the Freud Museum, where she created a permanent installation for the Anna Freud Room in response to the life and legacy of Anna Freud.

Solo exhibitions (selected)

Monographs

Von Zwehl's work is held in the following public collections: