Manuela Braunmüller (*1993, Rosenheim) is a German artist and photographer based in Munich. In her artistic practice, she uses photography to challenge the human-centered perception of animals and nature. Her work focuses on the background of animal-based food production as well as the influence of western natural sciences experiencing ourselves separate from other animals due to our ability of naming, categorizing and discecting. She uses the camera as both a research tool and a door opener to subject-relevant spaces such as scientifc institutions and animal husbandry investigating the intersections in topics of consumerism, modern animal agriculture, biology, and natural sciences,

By assembling what consumers typically encounter in fragmented parts, her projects offer a holistic perspective on the depicted animals, confronting viewers with the violent reality embedded in the animal industry. Across her works, Manuela Braunmüller delves into the moral contradictions inherent in human-centered relationships with other life forms, centering her projects on the interplay between the individual and the collective.

Her project Cow’s Milk, a self-published website, portrays the production process of cow’s milk in Germany. Through photographs and texts, it documents essential steps, from artificial insemination to the slaughter of the cow. In her work One Chicken, she further explores the perception of animals as products, displaying a complete chicken skeleton across 144 individual photographs.

In her ongoing work The Weather Is, she documents the weather as observed from her apartment in central Munich. Through this project, she engages with her feelings of climate anxiety, capturing moments of shifting weather as quiet, everyday urban scenes. The images reflect the gradual dissolution of familiar rhythms, seemingly detached from the visible destruction and loss associated with the climate crisis.

Her most recent work, 200 Million Years, combines photography, film, and audio to explore humanity’s diverse relationships with nature, focusing on the butterfly. The work contrasts a scientific-analytical perspective with a childlike-emotional one, fostering a discussion on the human-centered understanding of nature. As both a symbol and an admired insect, the butterfly becomes a messenger, drawing attention to the contradiction between humanity’s desire to connect with the beauty of nature and its simultaneous role in destroying biodiversity.

Manuela Braunmüller unfolds the contradictions embedded in the status quo from humanity’s relationship to the natural world and other sentient beings. In her work provides a reflection on the way we as a western society “consume” the natural world from a perception of superiority to trigger the viewer to the action that is needed meaning first and foremost expanding on the position one might uphold.