92 | 2005

Since the beginning of 1980, Camera Austria has devoted its attention to photography in the context of contemporary art, new media, new image technologies, and social developments. Special attention is given to current approaches that deal with the medium and the patterns of its reception against the background of overall cultural conditions. Such a general art debate is also continuously refocusing on the perspective of photography, which is why we felt this to be a good opportunity to discuss the work of an internationally established artist afresh: Louise Lawler questions her privileged position as an artist as much as she queries borderline institutional spheres. She identifies the autonomous art work as fiction, embedded as it has always been in social, historical and thematic contexts. Lawler has always been type-cast as being primarily concerned with critique of modernism and institutional critique, a fact that – according to Achim Hochdörfer’s thesis – has so far obfuscated the view of other important aspects in her work: “for example, what is the status of the individual photographs in Lawler’s work? Does she ultimately aestheticise what she aims to unmask and deconstruct as a power structure?” Hochdörfer investigates these questions among other things by analysing Lawler’s artistic practice of cropping (cutting out, cutting off and cutting away from her photos) with regard to Jacques Derrida’s comments on the parergon, the framing accessory.

In contrast to Lawler, who never leaves the systemic contexts of art, Sofie Thorsen explores the structure and appearance of spheres outside the art industry. With the aid of changing media she investigates the change of rural forms of housing, living conditions and social structures under the influence of tourism. In so doing – according to Sønke Gau – she debunks the myth of the cosy village as a phantasm, along with the attempt to capture reality. Where the subject of Thorsen’s meticulous analysis is above all the village model, Osman Bozkurt is in contrast interested in the niches of coexistence beyond the realm of firmly established spatial and social structures. Based on the situations photographed by Bozkurt, Basak Senova develops her theory of (unconscious and fleeting) “social resistance”, subtle opposition to powerful state machinery (here: of Turkey).

Resistance features in the work of Laura Samaraweerová in the form of questioning conventional concepts of beauty and space, conventional forms of communication and social behaviour, and traditional understandings of use and sequences of action. In her staged settings, supposedly everyday observations are transformed – according to Bruno Batinic – into seemingly absurd, surreal contexts and situations.

The works of Michael Janiszewski are also invested with an air of the absurd and surreal. After publishing a first monograph of his work in Edition Camera Austria in 2000, followed by an exhibition and artist’s edition the same year, we are now presenting his works for the first time on a larger scale in our magazine. “Related to photographic picture concepts from surrealism, for Janiszewski the photo becomes a vehicle of oppressive manifestations, metamorphoses, fetishisations, scandalisations and delusions in which set pieces of everyday life enter into disorderly, paradox combinations “, writes Manisha Jothady.

As we near the end of the year, we would like to thank our subscribers, readers and advertisers for their sustained interest in our project. We hope you enjoy reading Camera Austria No. 92 and wish you happy holidays and a good 2006.

Christine Frisinghelli