Closer Look Felix Schoeppner On Building Images From Scratch And What A Mouse Mover Reveals About The Future Of Work

Creative Boom: Inspiration Photography Felix Schoeppner on building images from scratch, and what a mouse mover reveals about the future of work The German photographer spent years avoiding still life. Then illness, a pivotal workshop and a very long stretch in the studio changed everything. Written By: Ayla Angelos 20 May 2026 Felix Schoeppner came to photography through a friend's borrowed camera and a skateboarding session, which is perhaps not the most obvious origin story for one of the more rigorous conceptual photographers working in Germany today.

He grew up near Frankfurt, is the son of two architects, and was surrounded by weekend museum visits, initially unsure whether he would follow in his parents' footsteps into architecture. He didn't. A Nikon D40, 6 megapixels, and a growing fascination with the medium itself set him on a different path. He studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, spent years assisting photographers including Olaf Blecker, Michael Schnabel and Daniel Stier, built a strong technical foundation – particularly in lighting and precision – and then, having done all that, decided he would never work in still life.

He changed his mind, but not before something more significant happened first. In 2017, a series of personal events disrupted a documentary project called Artificial Landscapes that had been developing as his undergrad work – a study of laboratories and scientific testing environments where nature is artificially reconstructed. A relationship ended, and later that year, Felix was diagnosed with cancer. Treatment was successful, but it meant months of surgery and chemotherapy, and a forced withdrawal from everything that he had been making.

When he returned, it was to a workshop at the RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt.RheinMain, led by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, whose approach to photography (which was intuitive and deeply rooted in bodily engagement) was unlike anything Felix had encountered before. Coming out of illness and isolation, it felt, he says, "almost therapeutic". Still life, which he had deliberately kept at arm's length, suddenly opened up as a space for conceptual thinking and something immensely personal.

01/06 His series Cognition – which was included in the exhibition Bauhaus und die Fotografie – Zum neuen Sehen in der Gegenwartskunst for the Bauhaus centenary, and shown across Düsseldorf, Berlin and Darmstadt – marked the public arrival of this new direction. It involves everyday materials, familiar objects, scientific reference points, as well as billiard balls arranged as a solar system, structures assembled from household goods, the logic of scale and perception bent just far enough to make the viewer uncertain about what they're looking at. The solar system image alone took three days to make.

Some images take weeks, while others take months. Now completing his Master's in Visual Communication at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, his graduation project, Handle with Care, pushes the practice further still – into questions about labour, automation, presence, and the peculiar ingenuity of avoidance. Below, he talks through the project and how it all came together. Much of your work feels sculptural and meticulously constructed. How do you begin a project conceptually, and how does that translate into the studio? My shift towards still life also changed how I approach making images.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article presents an innovative approach to image creation that can influence brand strategies, making it significant and relevant for professionals in the industry.