In this conversation Florian Ebner, Chief of Photography of the Centre Pompidou speaks with Adrian Sauer about his since 2019 ongoing work Truth Table. For many years, the two have been in an active and vivid dialogue about the conditions of contemporary photography.

Until Paris Photo is closing its doors, they talk about the materiality of the image, the operations of digital colour systems and about Sauer’s working method—using self-written computer programmes. They ask how he challenges the assumption of the photograph as a neutral document, what role the colour-space, the number of possible pixels (16,777,216 colours), and the archive of digital production play. And ultimately: What claims to truth does contemporary photography still have, when its production is entangled with code, mathematics, and automation?

This conversation opens up a broader reflection on photography’s status in our visual culture: on authorship, on the value of the real-and-the-virtual, on the shifting contract between image-maker and viewer and on the very idea of truth in an age of digital proliferation.

About Adrian Sauer

An essential constituent in Adrian Sauer’s work is the survey of the conception of photography in the digital age in regard to its materiality, its culture and its purpose. His works are distinguished by a unique and idiosyncratic appearance oscillating between hyperrealism and simultaneously a seemingly unreal surface. Sauer’s vantage point is always the permeation of phenomena in our visual and material culture. He herewith uses very precisely the different possibilities of image-making for the respective object of his photographic interest.

Adrian Sauer was awarded the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography in 2023. Adrian Sauer‘s works were recently exhibited in the following public institutions (among others):  Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Francisco Carolinum, Linz; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Tel Aviv Museum; MUDAM Luxembourg; Sprengelmuseum, Hannover. His works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA); CNAM-Centre Pompidou, Paris (France); Folkwang Museum, Essen (Germany); Sammlung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (collection of the Federal State of Germany); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (Collection of the State of Saxony) Dresden (Germany); Museum der Bildenden Künste (Museum of Fine Arts), Leipzig; Ludwig Forum Aachen (Germany) ; DZ Bank, Frankfurt am Main (Germany) ; Coll. Helga de Alvear, Caceres, Spain; Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf; Sammlung Olbricht; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (USA ); Thomas Olbricht Collection, Essen ; Zabludowicz Art Trust, London (UK ) ; Collection Majerus, Luxembourg (Luxembourg) ; Collection Banco Espirito Santo, Lisbon (Portugal); Collection Banco de Espana, Madrid (Spain).

About Florian Ebner 

Florian Ebner’s curatorial practice is marked by a persistent inquiry into the conditions under which photography operates today—its institutional framings, its technological shifts, and its political charge. As Chief of Photography at the Centre Pompidou, he approaches the medium not as a fixed category, but as a field in constant negotiation between document and construction, archive and circulation, authorship and apparatus. His exhibitions and writings often foreground the infrastructures behind images: how photographic production, distribution, and reception shape what can be seen and said. Ebner is concerned with the changing status of visual truth in an age of digital proliferation and with the ways artists respond to this shifting terrain through conceptual strategies, critical re-readings of photographic history, and an expanded understanding of the image as a socio-technical system.