»What is important is the form in the broadest sense, the structure, the arrangement of the photos. I arrange them into groups, for example into a palindrome or miscellany… incidentally, that would be a title for the Salzburg exhibition »A palindrome, various miscellanies«, because these terms refer to a linguistic structure and not to content.
There are animals in many of the photos; for me, they are something of a symbol of the creaturely, but also of how the perception of the other leads to an awareness of one’s own identity; and of further alienation, which occurs with the introduction of a symbolic sign system such as language.
My ideal is to get different concepts into one work – from the classical concepts or ideas such as »clair-obscur« or »disegno interno« to the current ones that come from sign theory.
For me, photography is a reality and a construct, it is a material, a language material, somehow also an object.«
from: Christian Wachter in conversation with Carl Aigner, FOTOHOF Info, issue 1/1987