Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer, born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany in 1959 and moving to Britain in 1984 after graduating from University of Leipzig in 1983. Her father Joachim Seyffarth was a German curator of monuments and photographer.
Her Sculptors project documented sculptors in their working environment and includes portraits of 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, 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 and of J.M.W. Turner’s House Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, London, from 2016 to 2017.
Her early work includes a large number of photographs of her childhood and youth in the GDR which is catalogued in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
She works primarily in black-and-white, using available light and Hasselblad.