Dirk Brömmel (*1968) is a trained photographer who studied communication design with a focus on photography at the University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden and then fine art and artistic photography at the Academy of Fine Arts at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. There he was a master student of Vladimir Spacek and received his academy diploma in 2006.
The inspiration for his "Kopfüber" series came about in the early 2000s when Dirk Brömmel founded the artist group "Kunstlicht" together with some fellow students. The collective received funding from the cities of Mainz and Wiesbaden , which lie opposite each other on the Rhine, which was linked to the task of transforming the exchange between the people in the two cities into an artistic process. Dirk Brömmel then repeatedly stood for long periods on the Schierstein Bridge, which connects the two state capitals, and looked at the people passing by. He also noticed the ships moving along the state border below him. So he began to photograph the freighters and excursion boats, the passenger ships and speedboats in numerous individual shots taken vertically from above. He then reassembled these individual images in his Wiesbaden studio to create a razor-sharp composition, detached the respective ship from the background and set it against a mostly monochrome background. With this process, Dirk Brömmel captures a moving object in a still medium and thus always documents time and transience in his works. In the years that followed, further cycles of works were created in this way, such as La Gondola in Venice or the Floating Markets in Thailand.