Quiet Witness: Florian Ziegler’s Photos from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026

Every year, when the conference is over and the chairs have been stacked away, there’s a particular email I look forward to. It’s from Florian Ziegler and it has a link in it, which leads to his photo gallery. This gallery is how I get to see the conference I just spent months organising through the eyes of someone else.

This year’s once more wonderful set is up. It contains 152 black-and-white photos from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026.

Black-and-white photo from behind the stage at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026: a long-haired speaker faces a full auditorium under bright stage lights, with a "45:00" timer and a monitor reading "Madness and Imagination" visible at their feet.

This time, I wanted to write a bit more in details about why these photos matter to me and why I think they’ll matter to anyone who was in the room with us.

A Different Kind of Event Photography

When you run an event like beyond tellerrand, you need different kinds of coverage for different purposes. There are the photos that document the event. Like the speakers, the stage, the partner, the venue and those are essential. They tell future attendees and partners what happened. I think Florian’s collection of photos is something else entirely every time. He documents the conference the way you’d remember it if you’d been there. Not as a programme of talks, but as a feeling of being among these people for two days and with a glimpse behind the curtain.

Black-and-white photo from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026: a barefoot speaker lies stretched out on a leather sofa on stage, one hand to his face mid-gesture, beside large illuminated "BT" marquee letters. The audience watches in silhouette in the foreground.

Look through the 2026 gallery and you’ll notice how few of the frames are the obvious shot. Yes, the speakers are there, but Florian seems much more interested in the audience than the stage. He photographs the room watching. Faces lit by laptop screens. A hand on a knee. The geometry of seat-backs receding into the dark. Hugs in the foyer. Someone laughing mid-sentence at the coffee machine. Someone alone for a second in a corridor, just thinking.

Some of his frames are more like paintings than reportage. He gets angles and views that are not typical. They provoke emotions and bring back memories I didn’t even know I was making at the time. ;)

How He Works and Florian’s Style

What I’ve always been impressed by and said this in the post I wrote for the 2024 photos is how unobtrusive he is. He’s been part of the beyond tellerrand family for so long that it genuinely feels like he’s always been there, even though my records say his first set is from 2018. I never see him taking the photos. I just get them later, and think: when on earth did he shoot all of these?

Black-and-white photo from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026: a speaker stands small and centred on a darkened stage, lit from above, mid-gesture with both hands raised. The venue's lighting rig and curved truss work loom around her, with a stage monitor and the silhouettes of a few audience members visible in the foreground.

For people who don’t know Florian: by his own description, he’s “a dad of two daughters and husband, web designer and developer by trade and photographer at heart”. He runs a web agency called Haptiq with his friend Claudio. His photographic life, though, is the one he talks about most warmly. He posts almost daily on florian.photo, publishes zines and printed books each year, and documents conferences he actually wants to attend.

Almost everything he publishes is in black and white. It’s not a stylistic affectation it’s how he sees. He has written that colour is a distraction from the things monochrome forces you to look at: light, shape, gesture, the fall of shadow across a face. His selection process for a final gallery is “brutal”. He’s said that the last ten photos he cuts have to really hurt to delete; only then does he know he’s down to the keepers. You can feel that ruthlessness in the gallery, as there’s nothing here that’s just there to fill space.

Black-and-white photo of a speaker presenting a slide titled “Mumbai is upgrading” alongside a “Diversion” road sign with the musician of the event at the desk beside her.

What This Set Captures

A few things stand out to me when I look through the 2026 selection. The portraits are unposed and conversational, shot at the distance of a friend rather than a press photographer. This makes sense, because at this point Florian is a friend to most of the people in the frame and certainly to me. The wider shots use the venue’s architecture deliberately: dark balconies, bright stages, silhouettes of heads in rows. And there’s a move he keeps coming back to, where the subject is small in the frame and the surrounding space does most of the emotional work. It’s a generous way to photograph a conference, because it gives the event a body, not just its speakers.

If you’re looking for the bright, pin-sharp press shot of a speaker mid-gesture, this isn’t quite that gallery. It’s the slower, more atmospheric companion to the official record the version of the conference you’d remember if you’d been there. And that, for me and without devaluating what other photographers of an event do, is the highly valuable archive every single year.

Thank You!

Thank you, Florian. For this set and for all the ones before it. You’ve helped me – no, everybody – to remember beyond tellerrand for years now, and I hope you’ll keep doing it for many more.

Black-and-white photo of Florian Ziegler standing backstage at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026, raising a camera to his eye. A second camera hangs from his neck. He's in a plaid shirt and jeans, surrounded by flight cases, cables, and crates of drinks in the dim wings of the venue.