Peter Dressler is a collector. He is on the lookout and works out his themes from thought and feeling. Dressler says that his home is the city, his surroundings in Vienna. In his works, he starts with an individual image and looks for the whole. A town square, for example, is a given for him, whose diverse visual experience can only be captured in a kind of almost mystical conjunction. The photographic processing makes the situation comprehensible, the subtle can be separated from the purely optical, the essential can be articulated. The expressive form of the tableaux grew out of a very special incentive: on a Sunday, he photographed all the market stalls that had been tipped together at the Brunnenmarkt in Vienna, which seemed to be deserted on that day.
Dressler selects the individual images for his tableaux in the sense of imaginary film scenes. What he appreciates about the fixating medium of photography is the opportunity to concentrate on what is happening at any given moment – better than film would allow, in which one scene blurs the previous one. In the end, all the captured perceptions form a series of images. Everywhere Peter Dressler looks for something concise, compelling, a piece of truth.
The photo sequences show the juxtaposition of human institutions. The psychological and social background of a city is not accentuated or emphasized, but is included in the picture through the equal representation of everything seen. The photographs express sympathy for everything that is. Dressler allows the viewer to rediscover the familiar and allows them to enjoy the aesthetic and bizarre motifs.
from: Eva Albrecht, FOTOHOF Info, issue 5/1983