Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer, born in Chemnitz (Karl-Marx-Stadt), East Germany in 1959 and moving to Britain in 1984 after graduating from University of Leipzig in 1983. Her father Joachim Seyffarth (1928-2014) was a German curator of monuments and photographer.
Her Sculptors project [1] documented sculptors in their working environment and includes portraits of Dame Elisabeth Frink, Kenneth Armitage, Andy Goldsworthy, Sir Anthony Caro and Lynn Chadwick.
A collection of her portraits of British scientists is held by the Royal Society and was shown in part in a display at the National Portrait Gallery, London including portraits of Sir Alec Jeffreys, Lord Darzi, Sir Martin Evans, Sir Tim Hunt and Dame Louise Johnson.
She compiled photographic records of the restoration of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, between 2008 and 2011, J.M.W. Turner’s House Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, London, from 2016 to 2017 and Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk, from 2014 to 2022.
Her early work includes a large number of photographs of her childhood and youth in the GDR (East Germany) which is catalogued in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library).[2]
She works primarily in black-and-white, using available light and Hasselblad.