Berlin is full of images that vanish as fast as they appear. You see them on screens, on walls, in passing conversations, in the city’s endless appetite for the new. And then you walk into Fotogalerie Friedrichshain and something shifts. Not because it’s louder, or more spectacular, but because it’s slower. Because these images are not trying to win a race. They are trying to exist.
On view from 30 January to 13 March 2026, :insight 2026 is the member exhibition of Deutsche Sofortbild Kunst e.V., presented in collaboration with Fotogalerie Friedrichshain. Twenty-four artists from across Germany gather here around a simple, almost defiant proposition: instant photography is still a human space, and it still matters.
The press text frames it clearly. While artificial intelligence floods photography with frictionless production, instant photography keeps defending its niche in art as unique pieces made by people. That sentence could sound like a slogan, but the exhibition doesn’t need slogans. You can feel it in the material reality of the works. The instant photograph is not only an image. It is an object. It has weight, surface, unpredictability, and a timeline. Light hits, chemistry responds, and the result is never fully negotiable.
That is where :insight 2026 becomes interesting, because it refuses a single aesthetic. The exhibition holds classic genres like landscape, portrait, and nude photography alongside works shaped by direct intervention, mechanical manipulation, and chemical alteration of the film itself. What connects them is not style, but attitude. The attitude of accepting that the medium has its own personality. That it pushes back. That it leaves fingerprints, literally and metaphorically.
One of the most beautiful ideas in the statement comes from Enrique Freaza Viera, who speaks about the analogue medium drawing light onto the object like material of the instant image, and following not only optics but also “slowness and mindfulness”. It’s a small phrase, but it lands hard in 2026. Slowness is not trendy. Slowness is resistance. Mindfulness is not a wellness accessory here. It is an artistic requirement, because instant film makes you pay attention before you press the shutter, not after.
Sabine Skodda, chairwoman of the association, pushes the point further when she contrasts digital precision and speed with what instant photography teaches: to accept the not perfect, to translate emotion, to allow surprise. That’s the core of the instant experience. You can plan a picture, you can aim for control, you can even manipulate the material with craft and intention, but the medium will always keep a little secret for itself. And in that secret lives the tenderness of this practice.
There’s also something very Berlin about staging this exhibition at Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, a space with a history that matters. Founded in 1985 as the first GDR gallery devoted exclusively to photography, and today focused on socially documentary and socially engaged work, it has always treated photography as a tool for looking closely at the world. PM_Deutsche-Sofortbild-Kunst_in… Instant photography fits that mission in its own way. It looks closely, but it also touches. It documents, but it also reveals the photographer’s hand, their patience, their appetite for risk.
If you visit while the show is running, there’s an extra layer: the programme invites the medium to leave the walls and return to the street. A photowalk took place on 31 January, workshops are scheduled for Saturday 21 February 2026, and a participatory action will close the exhibition on Friday 13 March 2026. It’s a smart choice. Instant photography is not only something you hang. It’s something you do, in real time, with real constraints, in front of real people.
Deutsche Sofortbild Kunst is still young, founded in 2024, but it’s moving quickly, creating a rhythm of exhibitions and showcases that give the German scene a public face. :insight 2026 doesn’t try to define “the” instant photography of Germany. It does something more honest. It shows that the medium is alive precisely because it refuses to be one thing.
And maybe that’s the quiet message under all the chemistry and all the surfaces. In a culture obsessed with infinite versions, instant photography keeps choosing the one-off. One exposure. One object. One moment that cannot be cloned without losing its soul. Not because it’s retro. Because it’s real.
The exhibition runs until 13 March 2026 at Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, with free admission and opening hours listed by the gallery and the association for this programme.