The photographer Josef Dapra was an important documentarist of Salzburg in the post-war period, who published numerous illustrated books and thus helped the picturesque views of this city to become internationally known. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, however, the FOTOHOF>ARCHIVE is primarily presenting an overview of the still unknown sides of his photographic life’s work, which also show him to be a distinguished modernist.

Josef Dapra was born in Lienz, East Tyrol, in 1921 and died in Salzburg in 2018. He studied history and psychology in Innsbruck and attended the renowned Adolf Lazi Master School of Photography in Stuttgart, which set stylistic and technical quality standards in photography during this period. In Salzburg, he formed a lifelong friendship with the founder of the Residenzverlag, Wolfgang Schaffler, and collaborated on numerous illustrated books published by the publishing house, including the writer Karl Heinrich Waggerl but also the architect Raimund Abraham. Not only did he have him build his house in Salzburg, but he also photographed the illustrated book “Elementare Architektur“ (1963, new edition 2001) with him, an artistic legacy of the work of Abraham and Dapra. The exhibition foregrounds this tension between classical documentation of the city and the modernist aspirations of photography as an after-effect of Bauhaus photography.