Sven Marquardt (DE)

"For more than thirty years, club culture has determined both my life—as a curatorof countless nights—and, of course, my life as a photographer. In a city in transitionafter the wild eighties and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had for the first time put mycamera aside. It was at the end of the 1990s that my camera again became a stylisticdevice for expressing our attitude towards life. Berlin has always been the settingas well as the inspiration for my pictures and projects."

Born in East Berlin, Sven Marquardt was a formative part of the emerging Punk, NewWave and artists’ scenes of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg from the mid 1980s. When the BerlinWall came down, he took an out-time from photography and immersed himself in Berlin’snewly developing club scene. Since the late 1990s, with his job as a doorman for the clubOstgut, he has been fascinated with the theme of ‘night.’ Sven went on to become thenightlife icon when Berghain opened in 2004. Inspired by the cultural atmosphere of Berlin,Sven returned to photography in the late 1990s with his exhibitions traveling the world.

Since 2015 Sven Marquardt has been showing his photographic work in variousexhibitions, including Berlin, Belgrade, Sydney, New York City, Istanbul, Montreal andParis, followed numerous invitations by the German Goethe Institut, lives in residencesand works for magazines like i-D, Interview, Numéro Berlin, SLEEK, Der Spiegel, Vogueand ZOO, as well as for fashion labels such as Hugo BOSS, Levi’s, ITEM m6,Baldessarini, Liebeskind, Adidas, Haderlump Atelier, G-Star and 44 LABEL GROUP.Starting in 2015 he has been teaching as a lecturer at the OSTKREUZ School ofPhotography and in 2019 as guest lecturer at the Polimoda, International Institute forFashion Design and Marketing, Florence.