“Dealing with history” has emerged as the crystallisation point of this issue, CAMERA AUSTRIA 49, the final issue of 1994. Although the four main contributions were not compiled with a view to this theme, they do each feed into the debate on the concept of history: Rolf Sachsse’s article about Ernst Haas monitors the migration and career of a photographer whose dramatic “Homecoming” pictures left their impact on Austria’s postwar photographic history up to the present. Sachsse discusses the oeuvre of Ernst Haas in the then contemporary context of the informel, against the linearity of traditional (photo) history and without losing sight of the effects of the history of publication and utilisation.
The myth of a general condition humaine (a myth that also has shaped the reception of Haas’ work) was given programmatic status by the “Family of Man” exhibition: In “The Family of Austrians”, Christian Philipp Müller analyses the historical and formal framework of this exhibition while casting light, in an attempt at re- and deconstruction, on the Austrian clichée that emerged from the catalogue’s image series, by offering insights, as Christian Meyer emphasizes in his essay, into “the ideological element in art as a social construct”, without necessarily destroying it’s “rightness or expressive power”.

Mitra Tabrizian’s “surveillance” is based on Foucault’s term panopticon (devine all-seeing) and questions, inher analysis of Iran’s history since the fifties, the homogeneity of the concepts of history and nation. As an image montage in the mannoer of the history painting, she deconstructs the complex colonial and ideological history of her country, attempting, as she does, in her essay, a connection between the concepts of surveillance and restistance.
In his essay, “From the World of Image Towards the Construction of Context Controlled Event Worlds”, Peter Weibel completes his exploration begun in CAMERA AUSTRIA 46, presenting the representational systems of the new media inaugurated by the findings of modern physics and placing them in an epistemological context. His essay is accompanied by examples of modern media work, mostly produced at Frankfurt’s Institute of New Media.

In the “Forum” series we present new works by international photographers, mostly positions that drew our attention at ther 1994 “Publishers’ Forum” in Arles and the “Primavera Fotográfica” in Barcelona.
We emphasize once more that, particularly in Austria, the history and theory of photography must remain a major theme if contemporary photography (the mediation of which has been seriously embraced, thanks to substantial public encouragement, by a number of institutions) is to profit from a continual debate on medium-related issues, from the critical questioning of historicAl positions and from a content-, form- and method-related discourse, in short: a theoretical foundation.
We thank our readers for their interest in CAMERA AUSTRIA and for their support, and with them a successful year 1995.

Christine Frisinghelli