As a publication of the Symposium on Photography 1997, the forthcoming issue of CAMERA AUSTRIA on the subject of “Agents and Agencies. Photography between Discourse and Document” will present a “global” line–up of authors and artists (from Timothy Druckrey and Sam Samore to Beat Streuli and Mitra Tabrizian), in comparison, CAMERA AUSTRIA 61 is strictly focusing our attention on a geographically narrow field. The main contributions in this issue present positions of Austrian or Austrian–based artists. The thematic and methodical framework of this issue is based on recent works of Elke Krystufek, Maria Hahnenkamp and Matthias Herrmann, discussing the latest positions, and on Cora Pongracz’ conceptual series from the seventies, the “Extended Portraits”, and Friedl Kubelka’s oeuvre, presented for the first time on such a large scale, in which the artist has been recording the life–portrait of her daughter Luise since 1978 in the form of a work in progress. The main focus is on the construction of the self-image, the view of one’s own body, the self–representation of one’s own identities in the work of Matthias Herrmann and Elke Krystufek, while Cora Pongracz and Friedl Kubelka concentrate on the complex identity of the other, the vis–à–vis. In the words of Maria Hahnenkamp, she too is working “with internalized images of the body at a symbolic level” on “making the imaginary visible”. The projects are accompanied by texts also (mostly) written by Austrian authors – by presenting the artistic and theoretical positions, CAMERA AUSTRIA 61 also exhibits, as it were, their geographical location and cultural context.

One of the aims we are pursuing with CAMERA AUSTRIA is to utilise the magazine medium in collaboration with artists and authors in order to create a public sphere. As opposed to the exhibition, which is always tied to a specific site, the magazine discusses hermetically individual, indeed private statements in an open, anonymous space of reception of existing media that is initially unstructured in terms of quality. Precisely as a result of their excessive privacy, works such as those presented in this issue thus refer to the relationship of sociely, the subject and the public sphere, which is increasingly coming to be defined by the media. Within the framework of the magazine publication they form exemplary sites of a specific interplay of images, texts and their appearance in the media space, representing artistic work as being expressly related to social issues. Selecting the magazine medium as a site of artistic statement implies challenging photography where it brings its full mimetic power, its status as proof of reality into play. In this way CAMERA AUSTRIA can discuss the wide range of aspects of photography as an artistic means in changing social, institutional and medial conditions.

We would like to thank everyone involved, particularly the artists and authors for their willingness to work on the CAMERA AUSTRIA project. Providing their works and transposing them for the magazine, elaborating subjects, and adapting texts and photos to the formal make–up of the magazine requires personal commitment and continuous collaboration – something that CAMERA AUSTRIA will continue to depend on in future, too.

Manfred Willmann, Reinhard Braun, March 1998