Publication: Liminal - Ingrid Dorner

Liminal, an artist's book by Ingrid Dorner explores photography as a process of transformation, in which images move beyond the fixed representation of a moment and become fragile, shifting material. Through experimental darkroom techniques, Dorner challenges the conventional codes of silver photography, creating images in which bodies fragment, faces dissolve, and silhouettes become translucent or disappear.

Working with a chemical process based on mordançage, the artist manipulates the gelatin layer of photographic paper, allowing it to detach, shift, and reassemble. The resulting compositions balance destruction and renewal, combining physical disintegration with poetic, sensory imagery. Light reflections and contrasts introduce moments of hope into scenes marked by vulnerability, violence, and uncertainty.

The project considers the instability of perception and the limits of security, inviting reflection on existence, memory, and the relationship between humanity and nature. Rather than treating a photograph as a fixed record, Dorner approaches it as a mutable object, shaped by both intention and chance.

Ingrid Dorner (b. 1980, France) is a visual artist based in Munich, Germany, known for her evocative, surrealist-inspired photographic artworks. Working primarily in the darkroom, she transforms processed negatives into abstract compositions that explore themes of ephemerality, existentialism, and the interplay between humanity and nature.

For Ingrid, the darkroom operates as a space of alchemy, where experimental processes lead to images shaped as much by chance as by intention. Her practice involves chemically manipulating silver gelatin prints—eroding, staining, layering—to produce fluid and fractured surfaces that resemble decaying silhouettes, fragile figures, or spectral apparitions. Her visual language is poetic yet violent, capturing states of transformation where destruction becomes a path to creation.

Her major ongoing project, Liminal, is structured in chapters, each tracing a psychological and material journey through fragility, chaos, resistance, and reemergence. It is a visual and emotional exploration of threshold states—those in-between moments where the body, memory, and image drift, distort, and reform.

Dorner’s work has been shown in international institutions and fairs including Photo Basel (2025), Art Antwerp (2024), Prague Photo, Festival Photo Experimental (Barcelona), and Rueff Gallery / Purdue University (USA), among others. Her images have been featured in Photographica, Musée Magazine, Rüm Magazine, Loosen Art, and the critical publication Nos Paris Critiques (Naima Editions, 2025).

first edition of 500 copies

stock number: NB860

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Liminal - Ingrid Dorner

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