André Lichtenberg

André Lichtenberg (b. 1964) is a Brazilian-born, UK-based photographer whose large-scale cityscapes and conceptual landscapes investigate themes of memory, process, and perception. His technically complex yet poetic compositions explore the interface between photography, architecture, and scientific inquiry. Lichtenberg’s work often fuses multiple exposures, long time spans, and manipulated perspectives to create layered, immersive images that blur the boundary between reality and abstraction.

Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to a family of European descent, Lichtenberg was shaped by both the sprawling urban environments of his youth and his family’s extensive travels. Early experiences with perspective drawing and a dual academic background in civil engineering and photographic arts laid the foundation for his hybrid practice. His photographs frequently draw from childhood memories and dreams, filtered through a rigorous and experimental approach to image-making.

Lichtenberg’s VERTIGO series focuses exclusively on London’s Canary Wharf, where he photographed from atop the UK’s tallest building. These vertiginous perspectives invite the viewer to peer downward into the city’s geometric sprawl, revealing tensions between architectural form, economic power, and social consciousness. In Within, a subsequent body of work, Lichtenberg expanded his lens to encompass global cities, constructing each image from hundreds of architectural photographs. These intricate compositions are digitally inverted and reassembled to depict city profiles as imagined memoryscapes—blending fact, form, and fiction. The series has received two grants from Arts Council England and was exhibited as a major solo show in Brazil.

In his ongoing series Impossible Utopia, Lichtenberg shifts from cityscapes to seascapes, producing composite images made from negatives captured over long periods. These works serve as meditations on light, time, and impermanence, where water becomes a site for abstract exploration and imagined possibility.

Lichtenberg has collaborated with international publications including The Sunday Times (London) and Le Monde (Paris), and has received several major awards, including the Aesthetica Art Prize, Renaissance Photography Prize, and AOP Awards. His work has been exhibited at leading institutions such as the Museu da República and Centro Cultural São Paulo in Brazil, The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and the Barbican Centre. In 2015, he was invited to collaborate with the Centre Pompidou/IRCAM in Paris, where his Licht Series was prominently featured, including a ten-foot print displayed in the plaza outside the museum.

His photographs are held in several notable collections, including the Joseph Cohen Family Collection (New York), Goodwin Law (London), and the Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust in the UK. André Lichtenberg currently lives and works between London and Brighton, continuing to explore the fusion of photography, memory, and constructed vision.