“Paul Albert Leitner’s Photographic World” could also be the name of a specialized, knowledgably organized photo business, of which very few still exist today. This association is not odd if one considers that in his meanwhile more than forty years of photographic work, Paul Albert Leitner has established his own personal brand dedicated to a rigorously analogue approach to the world, whose best (and only) representative is the artist himself when he—at times dressed in his “photo suit” for his iconic self-portraits—sets out to conduct “fieldwork.” A central element in this work of approaching and representing in the “field” is slowly and precisely exploring his surroundings, his attentive look at urban environments, but also at seemingly random details, which the flaneur Leitner encounters all around the world.

In 1998, he already wrote in his artist’s book Kunst und Leben. Ein Roman (Art and Life. A Novel): “The whole world is an image. The universe of images is in us and all around us. . . . Images are worlds, their own worlds of invention as well as of reality. Situated between them is the respective I.” This approach to the world, to being-in-the-world, and to images that constitute and define the world—always in relation to the self in the center of this framework—is the topic around which the exhibition Paul Albert Leitner’s Photographic World revolves. The diversity and wealth of exhibits thus offer a kaleidoscopic insight into the artist’s work and nonetheless reproduce merely a fraction of his extensive oeuvre, in which art and life merge in a seamless manner and which is characterized by an uncompromising contemporaneity.

The obsession that is also positioned in the center with the exhibition title can certainly be read ambiguously: It is about the artist’s passion for going on strolls, taking photographs, and collecting and grouping the themes and motifs taken up in his photography, but also about his passion for reading newspapers, which in this case comprises not only receiving contents, but also contextualizing and projecting them forward in a way that is as shrewd as it is witty. It therefore seems obvious that Leitner always has a pen at hand when reading the newspaper in order to be able to make notes in parallel. His entire oeuvre is, however, also about the obsession and the compulsion to explore the world and to expose himself to it, which is attested to not only by his photographs, but in particular by the numerous collage works being shown for the first time in the exhibition at Camera Austria.

In his readings and re-readings of newspapers, Paul Albert Leitner turns out to be a sophisticated recipient confronting the world, who comments on what he perceives in part laconically, in part ironically, and transposes it into unexpected readings. When he assembles headlines and pictures taken from well-known daily newspapers, but in particular from free tabloid newspapers into new, often-Dadaistic word collages, his own advertising messages, and complex comparisons of images that, not least, call to mind Aby Warburg’s well-known Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, or into spectacular-sounding headlines for putative backstories, he is thus not only a reader, but also an editor and author. It can thus by all means also be the case that under the title “Aufgedeckt” (Uncovered) contradictory headlines referring to one and the same event are juxtaposed with one another.

The passion for the boulevard, for faits divers—those stories of crimes, accidents, tragic love affairs, and unexpected deaths that Roland Barthes described as characteristic for daily journalism in his essay “Structure du fait divers” (Essais critiques, 1964) and in which everything that cannot be arranged in clear categories comes together—and the appropriation of forms of media staging is not the only thing that Leitner has in common with Pop artist Andy Warhol. The latter pursued something similar in his groups of works Headlines and Death and Disaster which both were developed in the 1960s. Numerous additional references to Warhol can be found in Leitner’s oeuvre as well: Hence, for instance, in the banana boxes referencing Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), which are not only used by Leitner as storage for his accurately sorted sample prints or countless collected newspaper clippings, but also themselves become a significant photo object and exhibit. In Warhol’s work as in Leitner’s, the occupation with forms of the popular and of mass culture should in no way be understood as a parody of an everyday life permeated by consumption and mediatization; it is not least also about revealing the mechanisms of the spectacular that stand behind them through appropriation and generating his own narratives from them.

The collecting, dissecting, libidinous interpretation, and contextualization of the present day becomes clear not least in the long-term project Die Wellen kommen (The Waves Are Coming), which Leitner initiated in 2020. Pictures of ocean waves, beach views, and closeups of effervescent sea spray clipped from newspapers and magazines come together here with headlines cut carefully out of these or other newspapers that address political, economic, and social developments: “Wave of Deportations,” “Unprecedented Wave of Bankruptcies in the Retail Trade,” “Data Protection: Are Companies Facing a Wave of Complaints,” “Wave of Laziness in the Labor Market?” While the topic of waves was initially connoted at the start of the series with the development of the Covid-19 pandemic (“Autumn Wave Is Picking up Speed, Tests Not Free-of-Charge”), here, Leitner has compiled an entire archive of wave-like movements documenting the state of the world in the 2020s, and that can consequently be read as an associative contemporary document.

“He saw the metropolis as a library with thousands of pages to thumb through if one felt like it,” Paul Albert Leitner wrote in Camera Austria in 1995 about his series Vienna: Moments of a City (1995–2006). Leafing through the many thousands of pages of the city can also be transposed to the artist’s photographic examination of the world and to his photo archive. Leitner’s cosmos of pictures, his overflowing photographic oeuvre, is thus shown in Paul Albert Leitner’s Photographic World in the overview of photographs taken around the world as well as in numerous sample prints and notes spread out on tables. The selection of framed photographs created between 1995 and 2016 and arranged in a Petersburg hanging invites viewers to enter into the themes that have fascinated Leitner since the beginning of his artistic examination of photography in the mid-1980s.

When doing so, one notices that he, as a person born in the Western Austrian province, has preferred to spend his time in big cities and that his photographic world reflects, quite literally, that of a world traveler: Photographs from Bangkok, Berlin, Havana, Isfahan, Katowice, Macao, Melbourne, Miami, Montevideo, New Orleans, Nizhny Novgorod, Beijing, Shanghai, Tehran, Tunis, Vienna, Yazd, and countless other cities are strung together in them. In the photos, it quickly becomes clear that what interests him is not showing views representative of the respective city or producing “perfect” portraits of architecture or people. The movements of Leitner, according to whom “the best speed for taking photographs . . . [is] the speed of walking,” are characterized by the wandering, the drifting gaze of the flaneur, for whom wondrous insights and views open up on every streetcorner—very much in accordance with Picasso’s well-known statement, “I don’t seek—I find!” “Non-places,” as Marc Augé defined them in his 1992 book of the same name, hence urban infrastructures and architectures of the in-between, in which people have instituted themselves and assume their place, elaborately curved advertising texts, brightly colored plants photographed against a radiant blue sky (Leitner describes himself as a “fair weather photographer”), or swimming pools gleaming appealingly blue in the sunshine are found in many of Leitner’s photographs. And, again and again, self-portraits: posing as a nude covered only with a bath towel or as a mirror-selfie avant la lettre in a hotel room; standing in front of a Chinese temple in a dandyish, light yellow “photo suit” that seems to have fallen somewhat out of time; or in a dark suit leaning recklessly against two stones in the ruins of the ancient Persian city of Persepolis, or as a shadow of the photographer on the bottom of a swimming pool.

The references in Leitner’s pictures are numerous, his passion for the European art of the postwar period, for Pop art and the American New Color Photography of the 1970s and 1980s is great, and it thus seems to be no coincidence that associations with other artists shine through in many of his photos—be they the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Picasso’s late oeuvre, Lee Friedlander’s photos of televisions in hotel rooms (The Little Screens, 1963) or his mirror self-portraits, the aesthetics and colorfulness of everyday American scenes in the work of William Eggleston or Stephen Shore, the austere, “deadpan style” of Ed Ruscha’s architecture photographs, the staged self-portraits of Gilbert and George . . . The more one occupies oneself with Leitner’s work as a viewer, the more his “photographic world” and his obsessive compulsion to wrest—and to add—even more pictures, even more associations from it unfolds.

Already in the early years of his artistic work, Leitner defined themes, motifs, and categories with which he prepared for his abovementioned “fieldwork,” but also strives, in his “indoor work,” to organize his archive comprising many thousands of photographs based on them. The sample prints carefully mounted on colored card and labeled with the number of the respective roll of film and picture and arranged on tables in Camera Austria’s exhibition space offer a small insight into this archive. They, however, also make it clear that Leitner’s attempts to subjugate his own oeuvre to typologies and to thus create order, as well as his photographic wanderings, again and again lead to wrong turns and detours, since many of the motifs taken into consideration (Street Life / Architecture / Signs & Advertisements; Hotel Rooms / Pools / Self-Portrait; Botany) can clearly be assigned to several categories and all of his photos pursue a quintessentially subjective gaze. In this sense, the archive is taken to the absurd in a certain sense, as what interests Paul Albert Leitner, despite the conscientious categorization and entirely possible assignability of his photographs, is ultima­tely not a comparative seeing, as pursued by the perhaps most famous representatives of typological photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher, but rather a returning-again-and-again to material in order to discover and rediscover images, and is therefore also an examination of the self.

Another central element in Paul Albert Leitner’s oeuvre are various objects that are intimately linked to his photographic works and frequently enter into dialogue with them in an associative manner. These literal objets trouvés take on various functions within Leitner’s “photographic world”: They serve in part as a source of inspiration and set associations in motion, while in other cases they become motifs in his photographs that often symbolize a particular temporality interwoven with the artist’s biography, such as the “Stuhl im alpenländischen Stil” (Chair in the Alpine Style), which was taken in Tyrol in 2016, or his collection of photographs of dysfunctional and discarded umbrellas in London. In other works, the objects as readymades removed from their original usage context stand for themselves, as, for instance, in the case of the abovementioned banana boxes, a towering pile of newspapers with news about Russia’s war against Ukraine, or an old bicycle seat just recently found in Innsbruck.

Leitner’s reference system is thus so complex and so often characterized by surreal chains of associations resembling a ramble through a cabinet of curiosities that the bicycle seat in the exhibition along with the photograph of bicycle handlebars taken years before in Potsdam might very much call to mind Picasso’s late sculptures in the minds of viewers steeped in art history. But this is only one of many possible readings, which can vary quite a bit during a subsequent plumbing of the archive. And this might also be what makes Paul Albert Leitner’s oeuvre so fascinating—the openness and enthusiasm for the world around him and his role in it as a documentarist and as a “partici­pating contemporary”: “My personal interest in photography is precisely that: to gain countless perspectives on the world, the world as a narrative in pictures.”¹

¹ Paul Albert Leitner, “Vienna: Moments of a City,” in idem, Vienna: Moments of a City (Salzburg: Fotohof Edition, 2006), pp. 187–89.

Christina Töpfer

Paul Albert Leitner, b. 1957 in Jenbach (AT), lives and works in Vienna (AT). His archive contains over 80,000 negatives from forty years of work. His photographs have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in Vienna, New York (US), Paris (FR), Beijing (CN), Dakar (SN), Lagos (NG), and Yazd, Esfahan, and Tehran (all IR). He has also published numerous artist’s books, mostly with Fotohof Edition, Salzburg (AT). In 2010, Paul Albert Leitner received the Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography.