Patrick Bienert
Patrick Bienert (born 1980) is a German photographer who works on long-term projects of portrait, landscape and documentary photography. He predominantly documents youth culture and transformation on the borders of Eastern Europe. In January 2020, he published the book "East End of Europe", about a pro-European generation in Georgia. In 2017, Bienert published the book "Wake Up Nights", about young nightlife culture in Ukraine. His projects are grounded in cultures and identity in relation to the history and its traces between the land and its inhabitants. Life and work. Bienert grew up in Munich, Germany, where  he studied photography at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie and the Munich University of Applied Sciences until 2006. His photography project "East End of Europe" about a pro-European generation in Georgia was published in 2020 as a book by Kahl Editions. "Another Magazine" included the monograph in its list of must-have photo books in 2020. Brad Feuerhelm wrote, "This is a lovely book full of promise and suffers little from the exceptional portraits that Patrick Bienert produces." Other bodies of Bienert's work include "Asmara" (2013), in which he photographed both the modernist architecture of Asmara, the capital  of Eritrea, from the period of the Italian colonisation, and the city's current inhabitants; "Clothing Trade", a project about the second-hand clothing industry in Tunisia (2018); and "Banks of Dnister" (2019), for which he followed the Dnister river along its route through Moldova, the breakaway state Transnistria and Ukraine, portraying the youth culture and the landscapes in the post-Soviet states. Bienert's work has been published in magazines including "The New York Times Magazine", "The Atlantic", "Double Magazine" and "Zeit Magazin". In 2018 he received a grant from the Goethe-Institut to work on his project about  the second-hand clothing industry in Tunisia. His personal projects have been exhibited at OFR Galerie in Paris; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; Amphithéâtre de Carthage, Tunisia; and Store Studios, London. Commissioned by the fashion brand Jil Sander, Bienert photographed at the Italian island of Ponza for the brand's pre-fall 2020 advertisements.