Matthias Koch (born 1964) is a German photographer based in Ardèche, France.

The photography of Matthias Koch does not seek to describe the world nor to offer a definitive interpretation of it. It unfolds over a long period of time, shaped by returns, shifts, and reworkings, in which each image remains open and available to new relationships.

The photographed places — landscapes, interiors, figures, zones of passage — appear familiar. Yet nothing within them is ever stable. What we see already seems to be withdrawing. The images do not impose themselves; they leave room for doubt, uncertainty, and a form of silence.

Each photograph exists less as an autonomous object than as a fragment embedded within a larger whole. Meaning does not settle in a single image but circulates between series, books, exhibitions, and moments of rereading. The photographs respond to one another, shift position, and sometimes contradict each other. They form a constellation rather than a narrative.

This practice rejects the traditional opposition between documentary and abstraction. The images remain anchored in reality while detaching themselves from any illustrative function. They prove nothing, denounce nothing, and tell nothing explicitly. They maintain a distance, a restraint, that opens a space of projection for the viewer.

Photographing thus becomes an attentive and measured gesture. Not a capture, but a presence. Not an assertion, but a suspension. The images receive what persists, what resists, what remains after the passage of time.

In this work, photography is not an answer to the world, but a way of remaining in relation to it — without reducing it, without fixing it, without exhausting its meaning.

Contact : matthias.koch@pm.me