Christa Mayer’s photography and video work focusses on portraiture. Her portraits evolved from close-up shots to more flexible environments and video installations. Initially, her photographic work was closely linked to her professional work as a psychologist: Photography assumed a mediating role in the young psychologist’s approach to her patients, who were not her clinical subjects, but soon her partners in a reciprocal dialogue. The practice of granting those being marginalized visibility and dignity makes her work outstanding. Mayer’s early work stands in the tradition of subjective documentary and German auteur photography. In the 1990s she turned to different media such as color photography, polaroid series, videos, and installations, as well as to participative and performative practices, inviting her subjects to act out artistic or emotional impulses. During her travels natural and urban landscapes caught her eye as animated and metaphoric sites.

Christa Mayer (born in Bad Kissingen, Germany, in 1945) is a photographer based in Berlin. She studied psychology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg and Freie Universität Berlin until 1975 and worked subsequently as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in a mental hospital in Berlin from 1978 until 2002. From 1980 to 1986, she attended classes at the Photography Workshop at the Adult Education Center in Kreuzberg, founded by photographer Michael Schmidt, and pursued her artistic career ever since. Mayer has been awarded scholarships and residencies in New York, Istanbul and Olevano, Italy. She has exhibited in Germany and abroad. Her works are held in private and public collections such as the Museum Folkwang in Essen or the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.