Matthew Shaul

Profile

Matthew Shaul is a curator and art historian. With a specialist interest in photography, and in particular the photographic outputs of the former GDR, he was one of the first graduates of the RCA’s new MA in Curating and Commissioning Contemporary Art in the early 1990s. He is director of Departure Lounge Contemporary Art, Luton (https://departure-lounge.org.uk).

Prominent curatorial projects include the touring exhibition Do Not Refreeze – Photography Behind the Berlin Wall (2007-10), Beyond the Battlefields (2018), a survey of the work of early twentieth century colour photographer Käthe Buchler, and The World is Not Beautiful (2016) examining the remarkable 1970s British landscape photography by John Myers.

 I am in the early stages of researching my PhD: Colour my Dreams? Colour Photography and the Invention of German Identity supervised by Professor Rüdiger Görner and Dr Emilie Oléron Evans.

Research

Research Interests:

Landscape and portrait photography,

Post war British landscape and reconstruction in photography and contemporary art

Photography of the GDR and former GDR

German Modern and Contemporary Art

Publications

Authored and Edited Books

• 2002: Theatre of The Unseen, Erasmus Schroeter, University of Hertfordshire (UH) Press
• 2005: Hiding in Plain Sight, Erasmus Schroeter, Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment, Manchester
• 2005: You’d Think So Wouldn’t You, Rachel Garfield, UH Press
• 2007: Do Not Refreeze – Photography Behind the Berlin Wall, Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester
• 2008: Clothes for Living and Dying Margareta Kern, UH Press
• 2009: Postcards from Vienna, Clemens Stecher Charade II & IV,
• 2014: Great Idea – The Work of Das Deutsche Handwerk, Stadtgalerie Backnang, Germany (ed & German English Translation)
• 2017: John Myers –The World is Not Beautiful, Cornerhouse Publications Manchester
• 2018: Beyond the Battlefields - Käthe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany in the Great War, UH Press

Edited Anthologies and Artists’ Monographs

• 2010: The impossibility of Socialist Realism. Gundula Schulze and the East German Stasi, Outi Remes & Pam Skelton (eds) Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing
• 2011: Das Erlernen einer Bildsprache – Leipzig. Photographie Seit 1839 – Thomas Liebscher (ed), Passagen Verlag Leipzig
• 2011: Unity of Purpose – Maria Gruzdeva’s Photographs of the Russian Space Program, Dewi Lewis (ed), Dewi Lewis Publishing, Manchester
• 2011: Some Notes on the Sublime – Personal Tempest, Tereza Kotyk (ed) Soaproom, Innsbruck
• 2018: James Smith – London Overspill, Nicholas Smith (ed) Relief Press

Periodicals

• Sept 2014: Horst Photographer of Style – Camera Austria,
• Feb 2015: Time Conflict Photography – Camera Austria,
• March 2018: John Akomfrah – Purple Camera Austria