The German photographer Valentina Seidel, who has been associated with Salzburg and FOTOHOF for many years, has examined and re-edited her early contact sheets and slides from 1992-94 in a cooperation project with the FOTOHOF>ARCHIVE. Alongside Graz, Salzburg has been a prominent location for the study of contemporary photography since 1975 thanks to the photography training program at Salzburg College. Since 1977, the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts has also had its own photography class. Valentina Seidel was a participant in the photography classes of Michael Schmidt in 1992 and Nan Goldin in 1993 and subsequently studied for a year at Salzburg College during several workshops under the artistic direction of Verena von Gagern. In 1994, Seidel went on to study photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where she graduated as a master student in 2001. The portrait has always been at the center of Seidel’s artistic work, documented by the publications “Exchange-Portraits with Artists” (2008) and “Eigenbrot” (2014), among others, which appeared in FOTOHOF>EDITION.
Her interest in the human image was formulated early on in her self-portraits, first shown as a graduation project in Michael Schmidt’s class in 1992, which will be shown in a “second premiere” in the current exhibition. During these formative years of contemporary European photography, the workshops at Salzburg College represented a variety of different approaches to the new artistic medium, from documentary to conceptual working methods, which were also to be formative for Seidel. Susan Derges, Peeter Linnap, Gérald Minkoff, Roger Palmer, Günther Selichar and Christian Wachter acted as teachers. The artist’s exhibition installation entitled “Learning from Salzburg… Summer Academy and Salzburg College 1992-94, a personal research” now shows a selection of the results of these workshops as well as a projection of the original slides from 1993, which provide a detailed insight into the artistic processes of Nan Goldin’s class. Furthermore, texts and quotes from participants from their time together at the Summer Academy and Salzburg College are embedded in the presentation.