Annette Frick
Secret Secretions
ChertLüdde, Berlin
1 March – 12 April 2025

For the European Month of Photography 2025, ChertLüdde presents Secret Secretions, a solo exhibition by Annette Frick (b. 1957, Bonn, Germany). 

Best known for her intimate portraits of Berlin’s queer and punk subcultures, Frick has spent decades documenting underground communities, capturing moments of defiance, vulnerability, and transformation. This exhibition, however, focuses on a lesser-known aspect of her practice: cameraless prints from the early 2000s that explore the “seeds of life”—both botanical and biological—by juxtaposing flora with semen to examine their parallels and complexities. In doing so, she unpicks the history of art and photography.

The exhibition’s first room is an immersive chamber where the two photographic series flicker across all four walls in a dynamic video installation. Titled Cosmic Elements (or Secret Secretions) (2002-2003), the digitized video presents Frick’s photograms on 16mm film, accompanied by an untethered score composed by her friend, American jazz musician Sirone (Norris Jones, 1940, Atlanta, USA – 2009, Berlin, Germany). Rapid and ecstatic, the videos distort the organic samples into abstract forms, ridding them of traditional botanical or biological familiarity. Even the title resists fixity, oscillating between its two names, Cosmic Elements and Secret Secretions, echoing the work’s fluid, ever-shifting nature. 

In 2002, Frick began collecting seeds and plant samples, documenting them using the photogram technique popularized in the 20th century by Man Ray (1890, Philadelphia, USA – 1976, Paris, France). Frick’s botanical research echoes the history of photography itself, tracing back to early photographic experiments such as Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800, Dorset – 1877, Lacock, UK) delicate plant images from the 1830s. Nearly a century later, Ray developed his “Rayographs” (1922), creating abstract compositions by placing objects onto photosensitive paper exposed to light. In picking up the photogram process, Frick herself re-appropriates this technique and interjects it with her queer, feminist lens. 

Limited financial and material resources are what initially led Frick to embrace this historically loaded method of direct light exposure. And what she produced are ethereal and visceral compositions. Against a deep, midnight-black backdrop, the spectral white shadows of plants emerge with ghostly precision. While she was producing these works, Frick decided to introduce sperm to expand the project’s scope. These photograms crystallized every air bubble and subtle movement within the fluid and preserved its dynamic potential in striking detail. 

Visually, these works recall Marcel Duchamp’s Paysage Fautif (Faulty Landscape, 1946)—originally conceived as a gift for an unrequited love—and Andy Warhol’s controversial Cum Paintings (c. 1978). Yet, in Frick’s hands, what once symbolized unfulfilled male desire is reimagined as a feminist intervention. While the photograms have rarely been exhibited, Frick’s film—as a result of sex and her partner’s support—was shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2016 as the sole female contribution to a film screening of abstract erotica, which also featured Duchamp.* Here, the work shifts the narrative away from male control, reframing ejaculate as both an aesthetic and biological phenomenon, liberated from patriarchal structures.

The enlarged sperm prints thus challenge the longstanding fetishization of the female body in art history. The floral photograms, by contrast, offer a delicate, poetic counterpoint to the corporeal imagery. Together, these works merge into a monochromatic landscape where organic forms—human and botanical, flesh and flora—intertwine, evoking themes of fragility, fertility, and transformation. Stripped of their conventional associations, these organic forms blur the boundaries between gendered symbolism, both amplifying and dissolving traditional connotations. Frick disrupts heteronormative constraints, inviting a more fluctuating and open-ended interpretation.

With Secret Secretions, Annette Frick extends her lifelong exploration of the body, identity, and the materiality of photographic processes, subverting historical narratives while embracing the fluidity of life itself.

Notes:

* Erocit Film! was a screening held at Centre Pompidou, Paris on February 17th, 2016 with works be Robert Filliou, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Annette Frick, Len Lye, Ernest Pintoff & Mel Brooks, Ib Melchior and Tony Conrad.

Photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza

Biography

Annette Frick (1957, Bonn, Germany) has spent the last three decades producing photographic works both marginal and experimental in subject and style. Documenting Berlin’s various subcultures, her analog monochrome images reveal moments of carnivalesque joy and freedom in the lives of people existing outside theheteronormative orders of urban society. From 1978 to 1988 she studied Fine Arts at the Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design with Arno Jansen, Daniel Spoerri and Robert van Ackern, where she also completed her Master of Fine Arts in 1988. At the same time, she worked as a photographer for various scientific institutes, published texts on art and photography, and founded the Hafensalon in her Cologne studio together with Achim Riechers and Doris Frohnapfel. She received the Emprise Art Award Düsseldorf in 2006; completed a research study for the DEFA Foundation with her film on Herbert Tobias in 2008, shown in the Panorama program of the Berlinale in 2011; and received the Cité Internationale des Arts scholarship Paris in 2016/2017.

In recent years, her solo exhibitions have been shown in Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, Bremen and Leipzig. She won the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship from the Akademie der Künste in 2018 and the Dieter Ruckhaberle Prize in 2020. She was also among the 2020-2021 grantees from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

From March 21st until September 14th, Frick’s photographs will be exhibited alongside works of Cheap Collective as part of a traveling show accompanying the exhibition Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which was initiated by Moderna Museet, Stockholm and shown in collaboration with MoMA PS1, New York.