Jan Staiger Turns the EU's Own Visual Rules Against It

German photographer Jan Staiger has spent the period from 2022 onward photographing the European Union's bureaucratic machinery across four countries — Belgium, Germany, France and Greece — for his project A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background. The series restages the Union's most familiar images while flipping their visual language.

Depictions of the EU tend to circle a handful of recurring motifs. The list is short: close-ups of European Commission leaders on podiums, renderings of glass-heavy institutional facades, and obsessive picturings of the waving blue flag. Staiger photographs that machinery using the same image conventions, then subverts them.

"I see the European district in Brussels as a sort of imaginary political green screen," says Staiger, who was born in Nuremberg and is now based in Brussels, where the EU has its headquarters. "If you walk 20 minutes further, you see all the issues European capitals face displayed on the street."

The gap between the Union's idealised self-images and street-level realities drives the work. The project traces the tropes of EU political communication and finds them often far from the realities of the place.

How does the Commission control its image?

Staiger's photographic record is constrained, partly through necessity. Photographers working inside European Commission buildings are watched by press officers, he says. "You're never alone."

They must also follow the Commission's protocols as laid out in its Visual Identity Manual. Staiger turns these protocols against themselves. His images, made ghostly by sharp artificial light, drain the staged EU regalia of its performative energy.

In one striking shot, 10 blue balloons — each printed with the ring of 12 gold stars — bob in the rough waters off Lesbos, Greece. The island has been central to EU migration policy since 2015, when it became an arrival point for hundreds of thousands of people crossing from Turkey. Staiger's balloons read as iconographic buoys: EU symbolism set adrift within the migration crisis its politics have yet to resolve.

The takeaway is simple: official imagery holds power precisely because it repeats, and repetition can be unmade from within.

What form does the project take?

Staiger began A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background during his MA studies at KASK School of Arts in Ghent. The series takes its most concentrated form in his book of the same name.

The publication is designed around the European Commission Visual Identity Manual:

• Bound like an official document stack
• Carries the title in all 24 official EU languages
• Laser-cut cover referencing an overlooked alternative design for the European flag — stars scattered in the member states' rough geographical positions, not the neat, equalising circle used today

That alternative flag hints at Staiger's hopes for the EU and its visual representation: reform, not complete overhaul. "I'm not naive," he says. "I cannot change an entire media landscape."

The photographer's stance is measured rather than revolutionary. His work can be seen at janstaiger.com.

As the EU's image machine continues to produce its podium shots and flag close-ups, Staiger's four-country series demonstrates that its own rulebook contains the tools for a counter-image.