Julian Stettler

Olga Bushkova and Julian Stettler approach the medium as a space of ongoing attention — to relationships, to systems, to the limits of what images can and cannot show.

‍

Olga Bushkova's project «Photo at 12» begins with a simple gesture: every day, she and her father exchange a photograph. He lives in Rostov-on-Don, 3000 kilometres away. What started as a private ritual has grown into an extensive archive of two lives unfolding in parallel — fragments of routine, of weather, of ordinary moments that quietly accumulate meaning. Bushkova treats this archive not as something finished, but as material that continues to breathe. She returns to it, reorganises it, reads it differently over time. In doing so, she reveals something important: that intimate images are never only personal. They carry traces of the world around them — political, social, geographical. Her work raises real questions about what it means to communicate across distance, and what care looks like when it takes the form of a daily image. Her engagement with the photobook further grounds her practice in a tradition of sustained, embodied storytelling.

‍

Julian Stettler's work starts from a different kind of distance — not geographical, but conceptual. His projects explore what lies at the edges of human perception: environments we cannot fully grasp, systems too large or abstract to see whole. In «Bis hierher und nicht weiter», he examines how Western culture draws the boundary between the human and the natural world, and what gets lost in that division. His ongoing project «Ist das, was ist?» moves further into uncertain territory, combining photography with scientific, essayistic and poetic texts to approach questions that no single medium could answer alone. Stettler uses the photobook as a format that can hold this complexity — not to explain, but to approximate. His work sits at the intersection of ecology, knowledge and responsibility, asking what photography can honestly claim to show.

‍

Together, these two practices reflect what Photoforum Pasquart looks for in artists working today: a willingness to stay with a question rather than resolve it, and an understanding that photography is not just a way of seeing — but a way of thinking.

‍

Selection committee:

Amelie Schüle, Director & Curator Photoforum Pasquart