dipshop gives a photography festival an identity without photos

dipshop has designed the identity for the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 without a single photograph, drawing instead on three things that usually sit unnoticed inside an image: depth of field, lens flares and burned film. Rather than graphically representing those phenomena directly, the Cologne-based design studio worked back to the conditions that produce them, translating the optical and material behaviour of the medium into a graphic language for a festival appearing at eight Hamburg institutions from June to September 2026 under the theme ‘Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other.’ Two primitive forms lead the system. The circle comes from the optics of photography, referencing the behaviour of light as it passes through a lens and meets the camera’s optical system. The rounded rectangle is drawn from the perforations along analogue film – usually taken for a technical detail, historically essential to pulling film through a camera. The third phenomenon, depth of field, takes no shape of its own; it enters as blur. “By altering the sharpness of the geometric elements, it changes how they are perceived and articulated rather than adding another formal component to the identity,” Founder & Creative Director Leon Schniewind notes. Colour follows the same principle as photography’s underlying mechanics. dipshop worked exclusively in RGB, using each colour at 100% and 50% saturation, a reference to additive colour mixing and the way digital images are formed. Through blending modes, those six values generate an extended palette of 12 across the identity. “The blending logic is what turns a very limited colour palette into a flexible system,” Schniewind tells us. “The use of blending modes also references the photographic relationship between positive and negative,” he continues. “Colours shift and transform through overlap and interaction, introducing a principle of inversion that is inherent to photographic image-making.”