Bildessays

This joint exhibition is the first exhibition of members of FOTOHOF since our foundation a year ago. Despite this, we see ourselves as a producer’s gallery – that is, as an initiative of creatively active photographers with the aim of giving photography the attention it deserves. We are still in a stage of development, where the photographers, in addition to their work, organize the gallery and all its activities themselves. No independent market for photography has yet developed in Austria; there is hardly any division of labor into producers, theorists, critics, gallery owners, collectors, etc. This is not only a disadvantage – it is also a chance for the self-determination of photographers in a little alienated work situation, which we try to use.
The German dictionary Duden calls an essay a shorter, easily understandable treatise on a literary or scientific question. Applied somewhat less strictly and enriched by the component of the visual, this definition could also apply to the photo series of this exhibition. However, a negative demarcation can be made with certainty: the exhibition is not a collection of individual pictures. This was important to us in the conception of the exhibition. The photographers want to convey information that is either literary, visual or conceptual. The photo is the chosen medium and thus the works already have a strong reference to reality. The picture essays exhibited here reflect their subject in a sequence of pictures from different points of view. Thus the point of view of the photographers becomes clear. Information about our world and the photographers’ will to form are combined into a unity.