Five years ago, the Wissenschaftskolleg established an annual fellowship for a photographer in residence. Numerous invitations to internationally renowned photographers have shown how artistic practices and academic research can mutually inform and inspire each other. The work of Hannah Darabi (Fellow 2024/2025)  and Arwed Messmer (Fellow 2023/2024)  is grounded in the archive. Both depart from historical photographs, taken in Iran and Germany respectively, which they do not only employ as documents that give access to bygone worlds, but also as material that can be assembled, presented, and reflected upon in artistic formats. Frédéric Brenner (Fellow 2016/2017)  trained as an ethnographer before he embarked on a lifelong journey during which he carried out fieldwork and took photographs of the manifold forms of Jewish life around the globe. Our meeting will explore the tensions inherent in the oeuvres of the three photographers that oscillate between documentation and art: How do photographs operate as documents in the context of research? What do they reveal? What do they conceal? What methods are necessary to interpret them? Does the artistic quality of an image blur or enhance its documentary properties? In the Meeting of the Fellows’ Club 2025 we will discuss these and many other questions with photographers, art historians, archivists, and curators. An excursion will give us a glimpse into the photo collections of the Berlinische Galerie.