Carsten Becker
Carsten Becker
Carsten Becker
Auf dem Schwarzen Meer (Horst Grund, 1941), 2018
Pigment print
84 x 63 cm (framed, museum glass)
Edition: 5 + 2 AP
Agfacolor is a slide film that made color photography possible starting in the late 1930s. The series emerged from research on RAL colors: archives were searched for Agfacolor slides by German propaganda troops, which proved unusable for color reconstruction – the film material was chemically unstable. Enlarged sections of these photographs make the aging visible: scratches, archival dust, and color shifts become image-forming elements. The material develops its own visual logic beyond the documented reality.
More Information
About the work
Agfacolor is a slide film that made color photography possible starting in the late 1930s. The series emerged from research on RAL standard colors: archives were examined for original color photographs from World War II, revealing Agfacolor slides by German propaganda troops. However, these photographs proved unsuitable for reconstructing historical colors – the chemical layers of the film material had changed over the decades and proved unstable.
This impossibility of reconstruction became the starting point for the series. The aged film material develops its own visual logic: scratches on the slides, archival dust, and color shifts caused by aging become image-forming elements. The enlarged sections no longer show the documented reality, but rather the material trace of time itself.
The destruction of the image carrier references the destruction caused by National Socialism – both materially and socially. What began as technical failure reveals the impossibility of an unbroken reconstruction of this history.
About Carsten Becker
Carsten Becker, born 1973, is a visual artist investigating technical standards (DIN, RAL) and their societal significance. He is currently developing a series on GDR-specific standards (TGL).
His research-based practice, often employing photography, interprets standards as reflections of German history, as seen in solo exhibitions like RAL (Berlin, 2018), Trauma through Time (Berlin, 2019), and Norm (Chemnitz, 2022).
After graduating from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (1999), where he received the German Thesis Award (1997, 1998), Becker founded an internet software company. Fully dedicating himself to his artistic practice since 2018, he has exhibited internationally, including the duo exhibition Continental Colors in Los Angeles (2022), shows in Athens (2018), Milan (2023), and an art fair in Copenhagen (2024). Recently, his work was supported by the Neustartplus grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds (2023) and featured in the group exhibition Gläsern at Schloss Biesdorf Berlin (2025). He lives and works in Berlin.