Photographer Armin Linke was raised in Milan. After spending a brief time in art school in Milan, he moved to New York and began working as a photographer for Italian luxury-interiors magazine Casa Vogue, gaining a background in both journalism and the production of lush, rich, and verist color prints, which formally and structurally underscore the conceptual aspects of his practice. In his photos and videos, he is primarily concerned with strategies of photographic representation and the intersection of collective memory, history, and the archive. Working globally and peripatetically, his practice has centered around the documentation, through large-scale color prints, of the effects of globalization and urbanization, and the consequences of both on local populations. Individual photographs such as Ghazi Barotha hydroelectric scheme, workers praying Hattian, Pakistan (1999), which depicts several night-shift workers facing both Mecca and the glossy, monumental slope of the power plant, demonstrate Linke's interest in isolated places on the verge of historical transformation, and the loss of a human scale under conditions of large-scale change. In several of his works, including Ertan Dam, Panzhihua, China (1998), people appear miniscule in relation to massive architectural or engineering projects. While Linke continued to produce images in this vein, his focus began to shift toward critical methods of presenting them. In 2003, he introduced his Book on Demand project at Utopia Station at that year's Venice Biennale. Viewers were able to flip through a computerized, interactive archive and compose their own, unique "Armin Linke" books according to subjective thematic, chronological, or topographical order. More recently, Linke's interest in the archive has taken the form of large-scale works of photographic mapping. In 2006, he was commissioned by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities) to produce a project; he chose to photograph every public institution housed in various historical buildings in Rome. His research, interspersed with excerpts from political philosopher Giorgio Agamben's Il Regno e la Gloria (The Kingdom and the Glory, 2007), represented the Italian state through images its architectural sites of power. Linke has had solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia (1995); Accademia Americana, Rome (2003); Guangzhou Cultural Transmission Center, Beijing (2004); Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris (2005); Museo della Calcografia, Rome (2008); and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany (2009). He has participated in notable group exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennial (1998); Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2000); So Paulo Biennial (2002); and Venice Biennale (2003). His work has also been shown at exhibitions at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (2004), and Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2007). He lives and works in Milan and Berlin.