Ira Stehmann Fine Art

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Ira Stehmann Fine Art

The focus of her work lies on photography. Her strength lies in conceptual work and the selection, evaluation and documentation of artworks.

For more than 25 years Ira Stehmann has been an adviser and mediator for contemporary art, liaising with both private and institutional collectors and individual customers. In the course of her career she has traced, evaluated, acquired, archived and documented thousands of photographs as well as arranging the resale of works. As a freelance exhibition curator and experienced specialist in the art

market Ira Stehmann advises private collectors, museums and companies. She has been working in this capacity, for example for the Nicola Erni Collection, since the beginning of the new millennium. She has built up a private library of several hundred art books, with a particular emphasis on publications in the field of photography. Ira Stehmann has edited and co-edited numerous works on contemporary photography that have been brought out by renowned art publishers. Ira Stehmann has excellent contacts to museums, private collectors and artists’ estates in New York, London and Paris and has been managing the estate of Jeanloup Sieff in Paris since the early 2000s. In addition, she has been the sole representative for the works of the well-known photographer Chistopher Thomas since 2007. She has been an adviser and provided exhibition concepts for companies such as Credit Suisse (Germany) AG, Frankfurt/Munich, Allianz AG, Munich, Hypo Vereinsbank, Munich, Paul Hartmann AG, Heidenheim, The Nicola Erni Collection, Argos Beteiligungsverwaltung GmbH, Munich, KBB Verwaltungs-GmbH, Böblingen, Richter & Partner, Munich/Frankfurt/Stuttgart, Get Mobile AG, Munich, Boston Consulting Group, Hamburg/Munich, and Truffle Bay Management Consulting, Munich, among many others. Ira Stehmann studied at a number of different European institutions: Art History in London and Munich, Business Management at the European Business School (EBS) in Oestrich-Winkel, London and Paris, as well as semesters studying in Florence and Parma. After working at an auctioneers, she became freelance in 1993. Between 2001 and 2010 Ira Stehmann was a partner at curators GmbH in Munich.

01/09/2026

Fashion steps out of the studio and into the streets of Paris.
Shot for Vogue Paris and featuring Jean Paul Gaultier’s Autumn/Winter 1991–92 collection, Peter Lindbergh Foundation’s photograph of Helena Christensen and Marie-Sophie Wilson in Montmartre feels almost like a scene encountered by chance. The models move through the street rather than simply posing within it; fashion becomes part of everyday Parisian life.

However, the image reveals another important side of Lindbergh’s photographic language. He greatly admired documentary photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand, and their influence can be felt in his preference for moments that appear spontaneous and unforced.

Against the glamour-driven fashion photography of the period, this approach was quietly radical. Gaultier’s theatrical designs remain unmistakably present, yet Lindbergh allows personality, movement and the life of the street to take over.

The result sits somewhere between fashion photography, street scene and cinematic still. A combination that makes Lindbergh’s work so immediately recognisable.

PETER LINDBERGH
Lionel Vermeil, Helena Christensen, Marie-Sophie Wilson, for VOGUE Paris, Montmartre, Paris, 1991
Gelatin silver print
60 x 50 cm
Combined edition of 25 across all formats, including the 90 x 60 cm size
Signed, titled, dated, and numbered

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25/08/2026

How much of what we see belongs to the photograph and how much do we bring to it ourselves?
This question lies at the heart of the work of Albarrán Cabrera, the Barcelona-based artistic duo Anna Cabrera and Angel Albarrán.
In their celebrated The Mouth of Krishna series, photography becomes a space between reality and memory. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, their images act as fragments from which each viewer constructs something deeply personal. A landscape, a reflection, a fleeting figure or a particular quality of light may awaken memories that have little to do with the place photographed — and everything to do with our own experience.

For Albarrán Cabrera, however, an image never ends with what the camera records.

Their meticulous approach to printing is an essential part of their practice. Historical photographic processes including platinum, palladium, cyanotype and gelatin silver coexist with techniques they have developed themselves. Among their most distinctive works are prints made with pigments on delicate Japanese gampi paper, mounted over gold leaf.

The resulting surface subtly changes with the light and with the position of the viewer. Texture, tone, material and reflection become part of the experience of looking.

Perhaps this is what makes The Mouth of Krishna so compelling: the works never tell us exactly what to remember or what to see. Instead, they leave just enough space for our own memories to enter.

ALBARRÁN CABRERA
The Mouth of Krishna #904, 2022
The Mouth of Krishna #528, 2016
The Mouth of Krishna #799, 2019
Pigment print on gampi paper over gold leaf
Edition of 20 + 2 APs
Signed, titled, dated, and numbered on verso

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18/08/2026

Few photographers have captured the sheer pleasure of being alive quite like Jacques-Henri Lartigue. In our photograph with Chou Valton a summer moment on the French Riviera becomes something wonderfully timeless. Lartigue’s camera was instinctively drawn to movement, elegance and fleeting moments of happiness. To life precisely as it seemed about to disappear.
He began photographing at only seven years old, documenting his family, early automobiles, aviation, sport, holidays and the fashionable world around him. Long before the idea of the snapshot became central to modern photography, Lartigue was already using his camera with remarkable spontaneity, attempting to preserve the exhilaration of an instant.

The Côte d’Azur became one of the recurring settings of this visual universe. Beaches, friends, fashionable figures and moments of leisure appear without heaviness or ceremony. In this photograph at Garoupe Beach, that effortless quality is particularly palpable: an intimate glimpse of a summer more than ninety years ago that somehow still feels close enough to step into.

Remarkably, Lartigue was not internationally recognised as a photographer until 1963, when, at the age of 69, his work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What had begun as an intensely personal record of life was suddenly recognised as an extraordinary chapter in the history of photography.

JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE
Chou Valton, Garoupe beach, Cape d’Antibes, July, 1932
Silver gelatin print, printed later
50 x 60 cm – Edition #64
With JHL association blind stamp, title stamp and certificate

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14/08/2026

Through Ira Stehmann Fine Art’s [] new collaboration with Dutch fine art photographer Neeltje de Vries [Neeltje de Vries], questions of female autonomy, freedom, and authenticity come into focus.

Centering agency and self-determination, De Vries reconsiders conventional representations of the female figure. Nudity becomes a means of expressing freedom and vulnerability, while emphasizing the autonomy of the women she photographs.

Rooted in a personal exploration of identity, her photographs balance technical precision with a distinctly contemporary visual language, opening a quiet dialogue around femininity and what it means to inhabit one’s image on one’s own terms.

The gallery will present works by De Vries at HIGHLIGHTS International Art Fair in Munich, October 15–18, 2026.

__ Neeltje de Vries, By the Pool, 2022 Neeltje de Vries, Silver Lining, 2023 Neeltje de Vries, Kate, 2024 © Neeltje de Vries / Courtesy Ira Stehmann Fine Art, Munich

12/08/2026

“I take most pictures when I’m not photographing. It’s in the subconscious.” — Neeltje de Vries

This thought offers a beautiful insight into Neeltje de Vries’ artistic process. Her photographs may appear carefully composed, yet they are never governed by formal precision alone. They emerge from observation, memory, intuition, and experiences that have often begun to take shape long before the camera is raised.

Neeltje’s background in graphic design remains visible in her sensitivity to lines, geometric structures, framing, and negative space. Figures are positioned in close dialogue with their surroundings; bodies, architecture, light, and shadow become elements within a carefully balanced composition. Yet Neeltje deliberately leaves room for something unexpected, a movement, an imbalance, or an unguarded moment that gives the image its emotional life.

This tension between clarity and instinct is essential to her visual language. Each photograph stands as an independent narrative, reminiscent at times of a film still whose preceding and following scenes remain unknown. The viewer encounters a moment suspended between past, present, and possibility.

Neeltje’s own search for identity and freedom forms an important foundation of her practice. From this personal starting point, she has created an evolving body of work that speaks more broadly about female experience, connection, independence, and the courage to exist beyond imposed expectations.

NEELTJE DE VRIES
XX, 2022
Craving, 2023
Sniper I, 2024
Guradian, 2022
Archival pigment print
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04/08/2026

At the heart of Neeltje de Vries’ work is a sustained exploration of what it means to depict women beyond expectation, projection, and convention. Her photographs do not ask their subjects to perform for the viewer. Often absorbed in their own gestures or looking away from the camera, the women in her images retain their independence. They do not seek approval or invite possession. Their presence is sufficient in itself.

Nudity, where it appears, is therefore never treated as spectacle. It becomes a metaphor for liberation, vulnerability, and self-possession, a way of leaving behind the roles and visual codes through which women have historically been defined. Neeltje’s photographs celebrate the body not as an ideal, but as part of an individual life and identity.

Increasingly, her work also explores relationships between women: between mothers and daughters, friends, and different generations. These connections appear as spaces of trust, shared experience, and mutual strength. Rather than making emphatic statements, Neeltje allows these themes to emerge through gesture, proximity, light, and atmosphere.

It is precisely this combination of formal elegance and emotional complexity that drew us to her work. We are very pleased to begin this collaboration and to bring her photographs into dialogue with the artistic positions presented by Ira Stehmann Fine Art.

NEELTJE DE VRIES
In The Passing Of Summer I & II, 2022
Archival pigment print
150 x 110 cm – Edition of 2 + 2 APs
120 x 90 cm – Edition of 3 + 2 APs
80 x 60 cm – Edition of 5 + 2 APs
40 x 30 cm – Edition of 5 + 2 APs

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28/07/2026

We are delighted to announce the beginning of a new collaboration with Dutch fine art photographer Neeltje de Vries.
Based in Amsterdam, Neeltje has developed a distinctive photographic language centred on female autonomy, freedom, and authenticity. Her images resist conventional representations of women as objects of observation. Instead, the women she photographs appear as self-determined individuals: confident, vulnerable, intimate, and entirely present on their own terms.

Working primarily with natural light and often in black and white, Neeltje creates photographs of remarkable compositional clarity and emotional depth. Her images feel timeless, yet the questions they raise are profoundly contemporary: What does it mean to be free from prescribed roles? How can vulnerability become a form of strength? And how might photography create a more reciprocal encounter between the person depicted and the person looking?

We have followed Neeltje’s work with great interest and are very pleased to now begin working together. This collaboration offers us the opportunity to introduce her compelling artistic position to our collectors, clients and friends and to present a first selection of her works.
Over the coming posts, we look forward to sharing more about Neeltje, her practice, and the ideas that shape her photography.

Our sincere thanks to Carrie Scott for first bringing Neeltje’s remarkable work to our attention. ❤️

NEELTJE DE VRIES
Sirocco, 2025
New Moon, 2024
Out of Thin Air, 2023
Archival pigment print
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21/07/2026

MUST SEES IN ARLES - My recommendations for you! 3/3
My days in Arles were filled with remarkable discoveries. One of the greatest pleasures of Les Rencontres d'Arles is the dialogue between historical masters and contemporary artistic voices. Around every corner, another exhibition offers a new perspective on what photography can be.

If you are spending time in Arles this summer, these three exhibitions are well worth a visit:
▫️ ANIMAL MODEL (La Mécanique Générale)
Curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, this ambitious exhibition traces more than two centuries of animal photography. Bringing together over 200 works, it explores how photography has shaped our relationship with animals—not only as companions, but also as symbols, scientific subjects, and mirrors of ourselves.

▫️ LISA OPPENHEIM. MONSIEUR STEICHEN (La Mécanique Générale)
Curated by Bettina Steinbrügge, Lisa Oppenheim enters into a fascinating dialogue with Edward Steichen's botanical photography. Rather than simply revisiting photographic history, she creates a contemporary reflection on memory, nature, and the enduring life of images.

▫️EDWARD STEICHEN’S NATURE
Part of this year's celebration of photography's bicentenary, this beautiful exhibition reveals a lesser-known side of Edward Steichen's practice. Rarely exhibited photographs highlight his lifelong fascination with the natural world and the extraordinary sensitivity with which he approached plants, gardens, and landscapes.

There is something truly special about Arles. It is not simply a photography festival, it is an entire city immersed in photography. If you love the medium, there are few places in the world that compare.

17/07/2026

MUST SEES IN ARLES - My recommendations for you! 2/3
There are exhibitions that revisit an artist’s work. And then there are exhibitions that reveal an artist all over again.
Visiting “William Klein. This Way to Heaven” at this year’s Les Rencontres d'Arles was precisely such an experience for me.

While Klein is celebrated worldwide for his groundbreaking photographs of New York, Rome, Tokyo or Paris, this remarkable exhibition turns its attention to another, equally important dimension of his practice: his relentless questioning of images, media, politics and power. Moving effortlessly between photography, painting, film, graphic design and typography, Klein never accepted the boundaries of a single medium. Instead, he treated photography as something alive, something to enlarge, paint over, rearrange and constantly reinvent.

What becomes striking throughout the exhibition is how contemporary his work feels. Long before today’s endless streams of images, Klein examined how media shapes perception, identity and public life. Yet, despite his sharp social critique, he never lost sight of the individual. Again and again, his camera returned to the people in the streets—the faces, gestures and energy that no spectacle could replace.

As a gallery privileged to represent William Klein, it was especially meaningful to encounter this thoughtful and beautifully curated centenary exhibition. Rather than looking back with nostalgia, it reminds me why Klein remains one of photography’s most radical and influential voices.

If you are visiting Arles this summer, “This Way to Heaven” is an exhibition not to miss.

WILLIAM KLEIN. This Way to Heaven
📍 Chapelle du Museon Arlaten – Musée de Provence, Les Rencontres d’Arles
🗓️ Until October 4, 2026

14/07/2026

MUST SEES IN ARLES - My recommendations for you! 1/3
Every summer, Arles transforms into one of the world’s most inspiring destinations for photography. For a few unforgettable months, historic churches, former industrial buildings, museums, and hidden courtyards become extraordinary exhibition spaces, while photographers, curators, collectors, galleries, and photography lovers from across the globe gather to celebrate the medium in all its richness.
Returning to Les Rencontres d'Arles is always one of the highlights of my year. It is a place of discovery and inspiration, a place where unexpected encounters, remarkable exhibitions, and long conversations about photography unfold almost effortlessly. No matter how often I come back, Arles never ceases to surprise me.

This year’s edition is once again exceptional. If you are planning a visit this summer, these are four exhibitions I wholeheartedly recommend:
▫️ GERHARD RICHTER. Overpainted Photographs (LUMA Arles)
Richter’s celebrated series dissolves the boundaries between photography and painting, inviting viewers to reconsider the photographic image itself.

▫️ Dior Official YOUNG TALENT AWARD – Milena Schilling (LUMA Arles)
A wonderful opportunity to discover one of the most exciting emerging photographic voices, whose thoughtful visual language perfectly embodies the spirit of the award.

▫️ MARTINE BARRAT. Soul of a City (Espace Van Gogh)
From Harlem and the South Bronx to La Goutte d’Or in Paris, Martine Barrat Archives captures neighbourhoods with remarkable empathy, revealing the beauty, dignity, and strength of everyday life.

▫️ HARRY GRUYAERT. A Sense of Place (Chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan, )
A masterclass in color photography, where light, atmosphere, and composition come together to create images that are as much about emotion as they are about place.

Year after year, Arles demonstrates why photography continues to be one of the most fascinating artistic mediums of our time: endlessly diverse, deeply human, and always capable of revealing new ways of seeing.

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