photo: Eduardo Navarro

Valentin Goppel (b. 2000, Regensburg) is a documentary photographer based in Hannover, Germany. In his work, he combines document and expression into a subjective form of testimony, linking personal perspective with broader social questions.
At nineteen, Goppel traveled to rural Argentina to photograph the lives of teenagers in the village of Maria Susana. The resulting project, Allá, en la pampa, received the Vonovia Award for Photography in 2020 and set his career in motion. In its wake, Die Zeit commissioned him to document a his own generation during the Covid pandemic. That commission grew into Between the Years, his first major project. Moving between found scenes and arranged portraits, it reaches for the diffuse feeling of growing up in times of upheaval. It was published as a photobook by GOST in 2024.
Fleeting, made at the Polish-Ukrainian border in the early weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion, is an uncertain, self-questioning work: a record of displacement in which Goppel confronts the limits of photography as witness.
Since 2023, he has been developing False Prophet Radio, an ongoing portrait of the United States made across repeated solo journeys through the American West and South. Drawing on the long tradition of European photographers turning their gaze on American life, Goppel uses his own sense of displacement as an outsider to probe the gap between America's self-image and the country he encounters on its roads. Goppel's work has been published by The New York Times, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, HUCK, and others. His photographs are held in the collections of the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Kunsthalle Bremen, and the Grafschafter Volksbank, among others. He has received the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award, the Visa pour l'image Urban Newcomer Grant, and the Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant, and has exhibited internationally. He holds a teaching position at the University of Applied Sciences Deggendorf and will be an artist-in-residence at Maison Marcelle in autumn 2026.