Camera Austria International

72 | 2000

  • CHRISTINE FRISINGHELLI
    William Eggleston: Morals of Vision
  • WILLIAM EGGLESTON
  • ELIZABETH COWIE
    Perceiving Memory and Tales of the Other. On the Video Art of Milica Tomić
  • BRANIMIR STOJANOVIC
    Milica Tomić: The Politics of Memory
  • MILICA TOMIĆ
  • YILMAZ DZIEWIOR
    Sharon Lockhart: Concept, Structure and Passion
  • SHARON LOCKHART
  • JOHN SLYCE
    Reading Lessons. Susan Lipper’s “Trip”
  • SUSAN LIPPER
  • ROLF SACHSSE
    Marginalien zur Fotografie. Bildoberflächen - Neue Momente einer alten Debatte
  • CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA
    Stefan Römer: How critical can pictures be?
  • STEFAN RÖMER
  • ÖSTERREICH 2000:
    Contributions

Preface

“We Like You, We Live Here” is the title of the contribution of the British artist couple Art in Ruins for our ongoing discussion platform on the subject of “Austria 2000” launched at the beginning of the year. “We Like You, We Live Here” could be a leitmotif for the contributions assembled for this issue, both those that explicitly address political topics and those that exemplarily discuss issues specific to particular media.
One notable fact, for instance, is that the discussion in the monographic contributions focuses particularly on the documentary aspect of their work. William Eggleston’s democratic image process, described by Christine Frisinghelli in her article, is conceptually linked with a profound, longing feeling for the settings he photographed. Susan Lipper takes up this in her staged documentary photography by adding texts to her pictures that call on the viewer to construct meaningful chains of meaning for her serial works. Far more explicitly than Eggleston, then, Lipper calls on the viewer of her photographic road movies intentionally to thwart the documentary nature of her work by means of individual viewpoints. Sharon Lockhart’s photographic and film work is marked by a conceptual stringency imposed on her by her ethnographical interest that is constantly at risk of being seen as exotistic. While this interest in Lockhart’s latest works gels to become a documentary style, this character is broken down – as Yilmaz Dziewior tries to prove in his article – by a “conceptual aura”.
With his street photography, Stefan Römer looks for paradigmatic images that tell us something about the regulations of the public space and about the behavioural conditionings of individuals, thus trying to lend “critical useful value” (Christian Kravagna) to his pictures – a political intention concealed behind the apparent neutrality of the observer’s standpoint. The public sphere is also a topic in Milica Tomic’s work, which we will be presenting here following her exhibition in Graz at CAMERA AUSTRIA. Memory of one’s own past in the context of the recent history (not only) of Yugoslavia linked with her biography plays an important role in the works of this artist from Belgrade. The significance of the past in present memory always plays a key role both in her political work and in her work in connection with politics of identity. Tomic’s contribution and the exhibition of Art in Ruins, whom we invited to occupy space with their political interventions at this year’s steirischer herbst festival, as a reaction to the government in Austria, make it particularly clear that we too, as culture workers, must oppose a “politics of depoliticization”, as demanded by Pierre Bourdieu in his article first published in our discussion platform in CAMERA AUSTRIA, a text that assumed an important position in the context of the European social movement that he demands to oppose the politics of globalisation and neoliberalism.

Christine Frisinghelli, Maren Lübbke, Marie Röbl, Manfred Willmann,
October 2000

Entries

Forum

DOMINIC DAVIES

STEVEN TYNAN

MARLA SWEENEY

TATIANA LECOMTE

MONIKA BRÖNNIMANN

ANJA TESKE

Exhibitions

Anton Corbijn: 25 Years’ Work
Groninger Museum, Groningen
RIK SUERMONDT

Der anagrammatische Körper. Der Körper und seine mediale Konstruktion
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe
VERENA KUNI

Deutscher Jugendfotopreis 2000
Remscheid / photokina, Köln
WOLFGANG VOLLMER

Hannah Wilke 1940 – 1993
Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst und Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin
MAREN LÜBBKE

How you look at it
Sprengel Museum Hannover; Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie Frankfurt
JAN VERWOERT

Lisette Model: Fotografien 1934 – 1960
Kunsthalle Wien; Fotomuseum Winterthur
MARIE RÖBL

Instant History. Re-play – Anfänge der Medienkunst in Österreich
Generali Foundation, Wien
VRÄÄTH ÖHNER

Books

Without Sanctuary
Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fé/New Mexico 2000
CARLO MCCORMICK

Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Scalo, Zürich – Berlin – New York 2000
SVEN LÜTTICKEN

Imprint

Publisher: Manfred Willmann. Owner: Verein CAMERA AUSTRIA, Labor für Fotografie und Theorie
Sparkassenplatz 2, A-8010 Graz

Editors: Christine Frisinghelli, Maren Lübbke, Marie Röbl
Translations: Borislav Mikulic, Wilfried Prantner, Richard Watts