It was raining, remember

Sophie Thun

2025

Photogram and contact print on baryta paper

25.4 x 20.3 cm

Edition of 22 copies (all unique) numbered and signed by the artist, plus two artist’s proofs and one publisher’s proof

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The edition

From the outset, this edition captivates with its formal and analytical depth. It reads as a kind of manifesto—a condensed expression of photography’s very properties. Through a mise en abyme, the image brings together a camera and a suspended print, the beginning and end of a process of recording that only the hand makes possible. Beyond the act of releasing the shutter and the manual labor of developing the film, it is again the hand that quite literally reveals here the image within the image, intercepting it in midair.

In addition to this hand-as-screen, the work also introduces three key motifs: the mirror, the window, and the door. They interlock like Russian dolls. The first two have long served as metaphors for pictorial—and later photographic—representation, while the last symbolizes the opacity and isolation required of the darkroom.

This particular door is indeed that of the darkroom used by Sophie Thun, a space lent to her by her friend Daniel Spoerri during the final years of his life. The word “remember” written on the noren-like curtain hanging above it thus becomes a subtle autobiographical trace in an image where, unusually, the artist reveals only her hand. The essential function of photography as an act of archiving and witnessing thus finds in this invitation to remembrance a precise and poignant echo.

The artist

Sophie Thun was born in 1985 in Frankfurt. She lives in Vienna.

For nearly a decade, Sophie Thun has been building a photographic corpus that is both rich and remarkably coherent, exploring the materiality and potential of her medium, the conditions of image production and circulation, the notion of self-portraiture, and the representation of the female body. While photography is the principal tool of her practice, her work is also deeply informed by the vocabularies of performance and installation. Indeed, Thun uses her own body in complex, self-reflective stagings, most often nude and meeting the viewer’s gaze head-on. Positioned both behind and in front of the camera, she blurs the boundaries between author and model, seeing and showing, making and appearing—those very dichotomies that have long structured pictorial and photographic traditions of the female nude.

This sense of ambiguity is heightened by the artist’s ongoing work of multiplying her own figure. Through cutouts and collages, the physical layering of prints (in her studio) or superimpositions (in the darkroom), as well as through photograms that often reveal her hands at life size, Thun’s body unfolds into a network of paradoxical appearances—doubles, reflections, spectral presences.

The artist also pays close attention to the spatial presentation of her work. Large prints that occupy entire walls coexist or overlap with framed photographs; architectural elements of the exhibition space are integrated into or set in dialogue with the images. Through shifts of scale, trompe-l’œil effects, coverings, and acts of concealment, she extends into the exhibition space the same inquiries that take place in the studio and the darkroom: an exploration of the fundamental tension between the photographic image and its object.

Sophie Thun is represented by Galerie Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna).

The exhibition

Sophie Thun's exhibition took place at Yonkai from November 1 to 30, 2025.

Exhibitions

Contact

It was raining, remember

Sophie Thun

2025