About Lena Hoffmann

I was born in Hamburg in 1989. My father edited the local pages of a Hamburg paper for thirty-one years and brought home, every evening, the contact sheets of the staff photographers, which I learned to read before I learned to read. My mother taught geography. The combination, looking back, was not a bad foundation for a working life spent watching where things are and where the light is on them.

I came to photography late by the standards of the people I now work with. I read English Literature at Hamburg University, intending to become a journalist, and spent four years writing more than I photographed. The photographs were a sideline, and then they were not. I left a job at Die Zeit in 2014 and enrolled at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen to study photography seriously. I graduated in 2018.

The first decade of working life was editorial. I shot for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, FT Weekend, Stern, Spiegel, and the British and American titles that picked up my work as it travelled. I made a long-form documentary project on the small fishing fleets of the German Baltic coast that became my first book, Wetterseite (2021), and then a second project on competitive sailing in the Solent that became my second, Cowes (2023).

In 2024 I took on what was supposed to be a six-day assignment with the Formula 1 driver Alexander Macalister, photographing his team's Imola weekend for a longer profile piece. The six days became flying with them afterwards to Monaco. The two weeks became a year, and the year has become my principal working life. I now travel around the world with Alexander as the Director of Brand and Communications for his AM57 Team. The role is, in practical terms, a long-running documentary project on a single subject across multiple continents, with the privileges and the discipline that implies. I have come to think of it as the best assignment a documentary photographer of my generation has been offered, and I have no plans to leave it.

The work I do for AM57 is not the motorsport photography you would recognise from a Friday qualifying gallery. The cars are usually not in the frame. The work I am paid to make is the work most photographers in the paddock are not making: the long quiet hours between sessions, the people, the rooms, the light, the weather, the mornings before the engineering meetings start. There are several hundred excellent action photographers covering Formula 1 and the World Endurance Championship at any given moment. I do not need to be one of them.

Outside the racing calendar I take on a small number of editorial commissions a year, principally portraits of artists and writers. The composer Iris Lambert has been a recurring subject since 2026. The cellist Marta Heřmánková, the writer Olivia Laing, and the painter Gideon Rubin have sat for me in the last three years. The work I make in these sittings is, in temperament, very close to the work I make at a race weekend, which is to say it is mostly about the time before and the time after.

I have been a Leica Ambassador since 2024. I shoot principally on a Leica M11 with the 35mm Summicron and the 50mm Summilux, and an SL2-S with the same focal lengths in the autofocus equivalents. I do not work in studio light. I do not retouch beyond exposure correction. I do not stage. I do not direct. The discipline of all of this is the photography. There is no honest way to describe it that does not sound, to a layperson, like a list of refusals; the reader, in time, will see the work and understand that the refusals are the method.

I work in black and white when the photograph asks for black and white and in colour when the photograph asks for colour. I am suspicious of any photographer who has a categorical preference.

I live in Shoreditch, London, which has been my on-again and off-again home since 2018. I have a small place in Hamburg, near the Außenalster, that I can't bear to get rid of. I sleep most of the year, though, in hotels of wherever the work has taken me this week. I love it.

The photographs on this site are almost all from the last six years. Older work lives in two books and a number of magazine archives. If you have come here looking for those, please write.