Anne-Katrin Purkiss

Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer, born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany in 1959 and moving to Britain in 1984 after graduating from University of Leipzig in 1983. Her father Joachim Seyffarth (1928—2014) was a German curator of monuments and photographer.

Her Sculptors project documented sculptors in their working environment and includes portraits of Elisabeth Frink, Kenneth Armitage, Andy Goldsworthy, Sir Anthony Caro and Lynn Chadwick.

A collection of her portraits of British scientists is held by the Royal Society and was shown in part in a display at the National Portrait Gallery, including portraits of Sir Alec Jeffreys, Lord Darzi, Sir Martin Evans, Sir Tim Hunt and Dame Louise Johnson.

Between 2008 and 2011 she compiled a photographic record of the restoration of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey; England's only gallery devoted to the work of a single artist. It houses sculpture and paintings by the Victorian George Frederic Watts.

Her early work includes a large number of photographs of her childhood and youth in the GDR (East Germany) which is catalogued in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library).

She works primarily in black-and-white, using available light and Hasselblad.

Works in public collection

There are over 100 photographic portraits by Purkiss in the National Portrait Gallery collection including portraits of Denis Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Simon Rattle and Georg Solti. Further images are in the collections of the Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Society in London, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and the Arts Council Archive.

Publications

Local Faces (2001) Orleans House Gallery (with introductions by Bamber Gascoigne and Terence Pepper) ISBN 1-902643-03-8
Sculptors 1986-2007 (2007) Orleans House Gallery ISBN 978-1-4276-2471-0 (with an introduction by Victoria Worsley, Henry Moore Institute)
Images of the GDR akg-images (Berlin–London–Paris) (2009) ISBN 978-1-4276-4085-7
Scientists 1985-2010 (2010) ISBN 978-1-4276-4815-0
Artists at Home and at Work (2015) The Gainsborough's House Society ISBN 978-0-946511-60-0

Illustrations to publications

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (current edition)
Poland – European Tiger, Euromoney Books 1993 ISBN 1-85564-331-6
Finland – A Coming of Age, Euromoney Books, 1996 ISBN 1-85564-437-1
The lost Palace of Whitehall, RIBA, 1998 ISBN 1-872911-90-0
Postman’s Park: G.F.Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice Watts Gallery, 2008 ISBN 978-0-9561022-1-8
Watts Chapel: A Guide to the Symbols of Mary Watts's Arts and Crafts Masterpiece, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2010, ISBN 978-0-85667-692-5
An Artists’ Village, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-0-85667-696-3
Paolo Cavinato – Constellation, Royal British Society of Sculptors, 2011 ISBN 978-0-9521592-5-4
SKULPTUR, Hatje Cantz, 2015 ISBN 978-3-7757-4043-2

Portraits of Purkiss

The National Portrait Gallery collection has a 1994 print of Purkiss by Alan Symes.

External links

• Private homepage of Anne-Katrin Purkiss