Mark Peckmezian on the Kunstbibliothek Library in Berlin

Peckmezian, who photographed the portrait series for our Spring/Summer 2026 issue, tells us how a specialist library has become “almost like a friend”

“Wherever I’ve lived I’ve always found a library that I would set up shop at. In Berlin, that’s the Kunstbibliothek – a library of art books. After moving to the city I tried a few and settled on this one. It’s mostly for academic and professional use. I never really ‘took’ to academia, so I feel a bit like a fish out of water there, which is quite a pleasant sensation. At first it was a bit forbidding: this very serious, academic, ‘German’ environment – if you breathe too loud someone tells you to be quiet. But I broke through and now it’s a second home. It’s mostly about having a place that is devoted to reflective, explorative, analytical work, but dedicating time for that as an activity turns it into something magical, spiritual even. Sometimes I go there and don’t even get any books out, I just think and write. It’s magical to me. I feel like I have a spiritual devotion to the place, an almost parasocial relationship with it, like it’s a friend or something.” 

Mark Peckmezian, who photographed the portrait series for our Spring/Summer 2026 issue, “lives” for projects like these. Portraiture was how the photographer first began. “What makes portraiture so beguiling and of infinite interest to me is the basic paradox of it all: my subjectivity encountering someone else’s. It’s slippage and noise, it’s so fuzzy,” he says, continuing: “Is my read true of that person? Of course not. It’s tangled forever in our subjectivity. And then the output is so heavily mediated. It’s a sort of sisyphean task that I do with pleasure, never expecting or even desiring to finish.” 

Peckmezian’s work ranges from intimate personal projects to editorial and commercial shoots with fashion houses including Gucci, Balenciaga, Hermès and Bottega Veneta, among others. The process translates to a degree, but each situation is case specific and he recognises the distinctions. “The marriage of a delicate creative act with the restrictions, requirements, vagaries of actual production – I’ve learned to see the zen of this. These things can be totally copacetic. They must be.” His photobook, Nice, was the organic product of his curiosity, made possible by the travel that accompanies his line of work. He’d extend each trip to take portraits of people that interested him. “After a while, the pictures started piling up” – he photographed over 1,000 people – “and it felt appropriate to resolve it into a book.” Peckmezian continues to work like this, making the AnOther Thing I Wanted to Tell You … section a good fit for the photographer. 

Before settling into a new idea or terrain after completing a big round of work, Peckmezian enters a phase that feels like “play and discovery”, looking at books by artists he’s been thinking about, daydreaming and writing in the library. Last year, he thought a lot about Pre-Modern and Modern print techniques from Goya’s to Vallotton’s. “I feel like they were doing snapshot photography before snapshot photography – prints so full of elemental structures: solids, visual sound economies, directness and clarity. The greatest ones are the ones that do this while achieving something complex, this rarefied, blissful form: complexity through simplicity. The best ‘snapshots’ do this too. It’s a playground to work with.”

This gallery features in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale now.