Oliver Richon’s (born 1956 Lausanne) contribution to contemporary photography is of double importance: as an artist and as theoretician. With his works “The Academy” (1985, published in Camera Austria international 25/1987), as well as with the recently published work “A Devouring Eye” (Camera Austria international 37/1991), Richon uses “the illusionism of photography, without perpetuating the ideology of naturalism associated with it. Rather, naturalism is deconstructed by means of a rhetoric of the image. This rhetoric displays the image as a form of simulation which does not presuppose the correspondance of the image to the Real. In this it is pure theatre: Richons’s photographs are the mise-en-scène of a discourse, the discourse of verisimilitude in Western art and metaphysics.” (Michael Newman, Camera Austria International 25/1988)

Jury
Antonín Dufek, Curator at Moravska Galerie, Brno
Ute Eskildsen, Curator at Museum Folkwang, Essen
Peter Galassi, Curator at Museum of Modern Art, New York
Charles Hagen, Art Critic, former Editor or Aperture magazine, New York
Finn Thrane, Director of Museet for Fotokunst, Odense
Manfred Willmann, publisher Camera Austria International, Graz

The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz is bestowed biannually upon a photo artist “for commendable achievements in the field of contemporary photography. The award will be 100.000,- ATS, and will acknowledge a noteworthy contribution by the artist published in Camera Austria International since 1980. Its bestowal will also be based on expectations of future achievements by the artist.”