Könnte Sein

Könnte Sein, German for "Could Be," is a 2008 photobook by Katja Stuke, published by the Swiss imprint Kodoji Press in Baden.

The title's conditional, unresolved phrasing runs through Stuke's broader practice, which frequently works with photographs whose origin and authorship are uncertain: surveillance-like street pictures, appropriated news imagery, and self-made photographs treated with the same evidentiary distance, so that the viewer is left to judge what a given image could or might be showing.

Stuke, based in Düsseldorf, has worked in long-term collaboration with the photographer Oliver Sieber, with whom she founded the publishing and exhibition platform ANT!FOTO in 2010; her work, made independently and with Sieber, repeatedly returns to questions of surveillance, identity, and control in the image.