56 | 1996

This issue of Camera Austria returns yet again to various ways in which photography can function not only as an artistic procedure for social, political and urban analysis, but also as a method for constructing subjective visual topologies.
In an interview with Brenda Atkinson, Candice Breitz (who was represented in the exhibition “Inclusion: Exclusion” at styrian autumn ’96) explains the specifically feminist approach by which she reevaluates the role of pornography, connecting it with collective mechanisms of representation and identification. Her “a Rainbow Series” simultaneously reflects the current political situation in South Africa (the “Rainbow Nation”) and its highlighting of the role of desire in the construction of new identities.
Zelimir Koscevic’s contribution traces the development of Petar Dabac as an artist from the early 70s. This evolution, which has been intimately connected with gallery of photography at Forum Stadtpark, has led logically to a continuing confrontation of “the excess of reality”? a debate in which Dabac selects images that have been seen and experienced and from which he attempts “little by little” to produce a whole in which “one photograph evokes the other”. The series “Dear Pero”, a work in progress since 1990, describes this by no means easy process, a journey of detours which nevertheless progresses gradually and steadily from picture to picture.
Herta Wolf’s text about Aglaia Konrad speaks of the potential for order and structure inherent in urban space, a space which transcends the dimension of built architectures. These systems of order are also of importance to photography as systems of representation: by constantly turning to an urban space that is not locally defined, Aglaia Konrad also reflects the various different models of the city that have been adopted since the beginning of the modern period, and takes up a series of possible modes of representation which have been explored in the present century.
The Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen has made a name for herself in recent years with a number of substantial documentary series, including A Hundred Summers A Hundred Winters, a project about Russia published in 1994. We invited her to create a contribution connected with her current projects, and “Four Men” is the result.

Sabine Vogel describes the work of the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng as primarily the construction of a fictional biography, i.e. a system of reference for the definition of one’s own identity. The “Photo Safari to the Heart of Darkness”, to a place of initiation, of contact with ancestral spirits, becomes a metaphor for a search for identity, but is at the same time an attempt to produce a history of the pictures, and it remains trapped in a circle of projection and truth – an aesthetic search for ghosts, a hunt after shadows.
The contribution by the Department of Photography at the Schule für Gestaltung, Zurich, continues our series on institutions offering courses of study in photography. This series provides an opportunity for photography classes to introduce themselves in contributions of their own devising.
Having previously published two special editions (of work by Michael Schmidt and Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber respectively), Camera Austria is publishing a special edition of work by Candice Breitz in conjunction with the present issue. It has been produced for us by the artist from her “Rainbow Series”. The forthcoming issue, now in preparation, will include contributions by Joachim Brohm and Volker Heinze (Germany), Rineke Dijkstra (Netherlands), Maya Goded (Mexico) and Christian Wachter (Austria), as well as a text by Rolf Sachsse about Raoul Hausmann.  Finally we want to thank all our readers for their interest in Camera Austria in the present year, and to offer them our good wishes for the year 1997.

Manfred Willmann
Reinhard Braun
November 1996