Salzburg – Fotografien aus dem Archiv

The Covid crisis prevents many artists from going outside and dealing with the world artistically; many works therefore arise from the preoccupation with one’s own archive and in confrontation with the materials already available in the studio.
The curators at the FOTOHOF>ARCHIVE have done something similar during this time and have gone on a journey of discovery in their own collection. The result is an exhibition with 13 artistic positions under the title “Salzburg – Pictures from the Archive“. As the title suggests, all the works deal with the city of Salzburg. The earliest exhibits in the new exhibition at FOTOHOF>ARCHIV date from 1934, in which the young Wolf Suschitzky photographs the city during an outing of his Viennese photography school. The latest works are by contemporaries Michaela Moscouw, with a conceptual work under the evocative title “Pizza“ (2019), and by Clara Wildberger, who deals with the festival business (2016). Paul Albert Leitner’s index cards alone can cover the period from 1996 to 2014, during which he mostly visits Salzburg to work with FOTOHOF. In between, an extensive arch of images unfolds, which not only shows unknown corners of the city, but which above all represents a tour through the various photographic artistic currents. Classic press photography from the 1930s to the 1950s by Gerti Deutsch and from 1991 by Inge Morath are worth mentioning here.

American Doug Stewart photographs in the 1970s in the style of early “street photography“ in the tradition of Garry Winogrand. Otmar Thormann sees the city in a highly subjective view influenced by Surrealism, and Thomas J. Cooper, who was born in the U.S. and lives in Scotland, uses traditional large-format photography to track down the secrets of Salzburg’s city mountains. For Salzburg’s Werner Schnelle, motifs from the Lehen district serve as an excuse to draw attention to the unique character of analog photography exposed directly as negatives. Finally, the FOTOHOF>ARCHIVE also contains works whose origin is still unclear or anonymous. These include photographs of bomb damage after the Second World War, presumably taken by the American army photographer J. Malan Heslop, or partially destroyed negatives, which can be seen in the exhibition in the form of contact copies.