Martin Morgenstern, Sandra Buschow & Christina Töpfer

Guest Room is all about sparking collaboration. For this edition, Martin Morgenstern and Sandra Buschow from the PORTRAITS - Hellerau Photography Award 2025 have teamed up with Christina Töpfer, editor-in-chief of the magazine Camera Austria International.

Coinciding with the tenth edition of the PORTRAITS - Hellerau Photography Award, the theme for this Guest Room is: "Echoes of Truth."

"On the one hand, our theme reflects the various historical, cultural and political layers that have historically covered our founding building, the Festspielhaus Hellerau, over the course of more than a hundred years. It was built as an educational facility for music and rhythm, housed a large exhibition of expressionist painting in the 1920s, a police school during the Nazi dictatorship and a Red Army hospital after the end of the Second World War. After the political turnaround of 1989, the site was renovated in the 1990s and has now been a 'European Centre for the Arts' for twenty years. All these periods have left their mark on Hellerau, and we, the team of the PORTRAITS – Hellerau Photography Award and with us, hundreds of artists with their exhibited works have also left our mark here.

On the other hand, we are living in over-politicized times. Here in Dresden, in Saxony, in Germany and in Europe, we are currently facing huge political challenges. Wars, inflation, the rise of the extreme political fringes with their overly simplistic answers to people's concerns. Most recently a presidential election in the USA in which the focus was less on facts than on populist volume - all of this is leading us towards an era in which truth is devalued as a currency. It only appears in distant echoes, and you have to be very sensitive and look and listen carefully to catch a glimpse of it."