This exhibition focuses on Franz Hubmann’s early reportage work, with one whole room dedicated to his photos from Café Hawelka in Vienna.
Franz Hubmann developed his photographic style in the editorial department of the magazine »Magnum«. The topics of the individual issues were conceived in meetings, and then Hubmann went out to solve the questions that arose with his camera. He had to report on something that didn’t come across his path by chance or ran across his liver, but something that was shot together in his imagination and that of his editorial colleagues: thoughts and views on the present, opinions and theses, analyses of what one likes to call the spirit of the times; in other words, something abstract. Hubmann therefore shot abstract material, and it was up to his ingenuity not to simply illustrate a complex of topics.
From the very beginning, Franz Hubmann had the good fortune to be able to translate the intention of »Magnum« into differentiated gray values, which consisted of placing photography in the service of a grippingly illustrative analysis of time.
from: Alfred Schmeller, FOTOHOF Info, issue 3/1982