42 | 1993

With the photographic works of Luigi Ghirri, Silke Grossmann, Boris Mihailov ind Rudolf Schwarzkogler at the center of this issue of CAMERA AUSTRIA, the focus seems to be on far-apart positions. While there may be a variety of reasons for publishing on artist’s work, any publication is preceded by a process of careful consideration of the author, of his or her work and artistic position. Luigi Ghirri, a friend who suddenly passed away last year, had repeatedly cooperated with us since the mid-seventies – first as a photograph , then as an organizers and mediator of exhibitions, as a speaker at our symposia and as a writer. He had us experience his approach to reality, his view of today’s world, his personal combination of restlessness and relentlessness. Boris Mihailov’s work, on the other hand, had gone unnoticed until a few years ago, this publication being the result of an exhibition at the Forum Stadtpark after which he also took part in the 1992 Symposium on Photography.

The appreciation on which such cooperation is based becomes manifest in publications for the reader and view, with the object of creating an ongoing and comprehensive interest in an author’s work. It will never be the intention of CAMERA AUSTRIA to present the reader with anything completed (with answers, so to speak), and so the links created by CAMERA AUSTRIA 42 will also remain fragmentary and will raise further questions.To us, the narrowness of today’s “photo culture” seems sufficiently characterized by voluntary limitations, often excluding a parallel consideration of varying positions. Too grad is the influence of the debate on genre or style, too much is always being expected from a “new photography” or “shift of paradigms” for grasping the radical nature of an artist’s work.

When Rudolf Schwarzkogler, in his three major theoretical texts, chose the theme Panorama (this historic circular mural) as a synonym of the greatest possible correspondence to reality (in an attempt to describe not an artistic creation of reality but its true depiction), he took a position from which a view of his work must, first of all, avoid any inner-artistic interpretation: “I want my images to be understood as extremely representational” (Text 2a, 1965). Such work with and out of reality has numerous correspondences in present-day definitions of art and also in the “lack of style” mentioned and intended here:”Each object of art weakens itself through its style, through  the suppression of other styles”. The heretic nature and stringency of his work, his rigorous view of an art to be interpreted by each in his own way impressively anticipated today’s proposition of the viewer’s role in the co-creation of meaning.

At this point we refer the reader the upcoming issue of CAMERA AUSTRIA with publications of contributions to the 1992 Symposium on Photography on the theme “Identities”. The debate of the subject of Identity has been continued in the Forum Stadtpark exhibition program and will be completed for the present with the Mistaken Identities show in May 1993.

Christine Frisinghelli