Jessica Backhaus is a photographer based in Berlin. She was born in Cuxhaven, Germany, in 1970. At sixteen she moved to Paris. There she studied photography and visual communications from 1989 to 1993. In 1992 she met Gisèle Freund, who became her mentor. In 1995 she moved to New York. She lived there until 2009. Since then she has lived and worked in Berlin.
Her early work was figurative and often documentary. Over time she moved toward abstraction. She calls her series A Trilogy a turning point. In her recent work she bends and folds colored paper in bright sunlight and photographs it.
She has published twelve monographs. Kehrer Verlag published A Trilogy (2017), Cut Outs (2021) and Plein Soleil (2024). Plein Soleil has 96 pages and a text by Christiane Stahl. To make it, she moved for a time to the South of France, where the light is generous.
Her work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Kunsthalle Erfurt. It is in the collections of the Deutsche Bank, the Margulies Collection in Miami, the Art Collection Deutsche Börse and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2026 the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt dedicated a major museum exhibition to her.
