When you catch the images on this page out of the corner of your eye, something strange happens.
A red gumboot and a checked hood stop reading as clothing and start reading as parts of the concrete structure they're perched on. A blue-jacketed figure curls into the crook of a bright red slide, arm outstretched, until it's difficult to tell where the fabric ends and the painted fibreglass begins.
This is precisely the effect German photographer Kerstin Weiser is seeking in her series Von Sandburg zu Sandburg ("From sandcastle to sandcastle"). And the project has just earned her the HfG Rundgang Award 2026 from the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.
Weiser's starting point was playgrounds; specifically, the sculptural, brightly colored playground equipment found across Germany and, in the second half of this project, Japan.
Rather than photographing these structures as empty architecture, she dresses volunteers in clothing color-coordinated to the equipment itself, then has them climb onto and into the structures, photographing from below so their limbs merge visually with the sculpted forms.
The results, as seen here, are quite disorienting. In one image, a red boot and checked fabric hood emerge from a scaled, concrete structure, making it entirely unclear whether you're looking at a person, a costume, or an unusually detailed piece of public art.
In another, a white-gloved hand and trainer-clad foot hook around a chipped red surface, the person's navy jacket barely visible in the gap between painted forms.
The playground equipment, ordinarily designed to be climbed on by children, becomes something closer to an abstract sculpture that's partially swallowed its climber.
Weiser began photographing in Germany, where distinctive, sculptural playground design has a long design tradition, before continuing the series in Japan, a country famous for its own eccentric and highly designed playground architecture.
She is drawn to bold primary colors, organic and animal-like forms, and shooting in both countries allowed her to test whether her unique visual language holds up across two very different playground cultures. The consistency of the results suggests that it does.
Why it won
The jury, which included photographer Barbara Klemm, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt director Alexandra Lechner, and the Foundation's junior curator Cornelia Siebert, praised Weiser's use of harsh flash lighting, which flattens the images into an almost graphic, two-dimensional quality, reinforcing the sense that these are staged compositions rather than documentary snapshots.
That deliberate flatness strips away shadow and depth, and makes it genuinely hard to parse where sculpture ends and human body begins.
Born in Bingen am Rhein in 1999, Weiser is currently studying in the Department of Art at HfG Offenbach, one of Germany's oldest design schools, tracing its roots back to 1832. The HfG Rundgang Award, worth €3,000, has been presented annually since 2010 to recognise emerging photography talent at the university, with this year's ceremony held on 10 July during Offenbach's annual Rundgang exhibition.
Weiser's work will remain on public view a little longer: further pieces from the series appear in the group exhibition Worlds within Worlds at The Cube in Eschborn until August 16.
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