Renate Graf was born in Austria.
Literature, but also poetry, led Renate Graf to devote herself to photography. During her readings, images arise in her mind and photography helps to document them.
The camera began to accompany the artist on her travels, documenting them and her readings in such singular environments as South India, Morocco, China, Alaska, Russia, Yemen, Cambodia, Italy, Germany and Austria, where she was born, and France, where she lives.
Renate Graf has also created a series of exclusive images in the studio of artist Anselm Kiefer, with whom she shared her live for many years.
Writers and poets such as Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Edmond Jabès, Paul Valéry and Herman Broch are a constant source of inspiration. Cinema also plays an important role in her work and directors such as Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Visconti and Tarkovsky are important references for Renate Graf who, through her unique perspective, transforms images into presences.
About her work, Renate Graf says: "I am not a photographer in the classical sense of the word, my images exist to serve a different purpose than that of any true photographer, they are not complete or conclusive. Nor are they perfect photographs in search of technical perfection. They function not only as images, but as language, as signs pointing to a meaning ... They do not define, they testify, and in the cultural diversity of a universe, they are a language in themselves, my language to describe what I see. "
Renate Graf works mainly with film photography and black and white prints. Initially, she began by creating travel notebooks composed of images, to which she associated texts by the authors who inspire her, written by hand. This process became more and more manual, giving rise to larger format books, hand-bound by the artist herself. It is during this process and in this context that the need is felt to create larger format images that are developed in the darkroom using traditional techniques.
In 2019, the gallery co-produced Renate Graf's first solo exhibition in Portugal, entitled The Photographer's chronicles: thoughts become images 1992 | 2019. The exhibition, consisting of approximately 180 works, presents two decades of travel from South India to Anselm Kiefer's studio.
The artist currently lives between Paris and Lisbon.