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.
There are over 100 photographic portraits by Purkiss in the National Portrait Gallery collection[3] including portraits of Denis Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Simon Rattle and Georg Solti. Her work is also held in the collections of the Library of the Royal Academy of Arts,[4] the Royal Society, London,[5] the Henry Moore Institute,[6] Leeds, the New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge,[7] the Ingram Collection,[8] in the archive of TATE,[9] the National Art Library[10] and the library of Yale Centre for British Art.[11]
Local Faces (2001) Orleans House Gallery (with introductions by Bamber Gascoigne and Terence Pepper)
Sculptors 1986-2007 (2007) Orleans House Gallery (with an introduction by Victoria Worsley, Henry Moore Institute)
Images of the GDR akg-images (Berlin–London–Paris) (2009)
Scientists 1985-2010 (2010)
Artists at Home and at Work (2015) The Gainsborough's House Society
Faces of the South Downs - Portraits of a Landscape (2015) Miriquidi Books [12]
Sculptors 1986-2016 (2017) Miriquidi Books ; foreword by Peter Murray (Yorkshire Sculpture Park) and Adrian Glew, archivist at Tate Gallery
Anthony Eyton - Studio pictures (2017) Miriquidi Books
Creative Connections – Portraits of Women Scientists and Artists (2019), Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Sculptors at Work (2021) F.E.McWilliam Gallery & Studio
Gainsborough’s House – Reviving an Artist’s Birthplace (2023) Gainsborough’s House Society
The National Portrait Gallery collection has a 1994 print of Purkiss[13] by Alan Symes.