Contributions to a History of Photography in Austria, volume 25.

Edited by Monika Faber for Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna, and Walter Moser for the Photographic Collection of the Albertina, Vienna

The adventurers, admirals, sailors, and explorers who sailed the world’s oceans under the Austrian flag left behind more than just photographs of their distant destinations, from the polar seas to the tropics. Starting in 1855, cameras were also in use on board. The ship, as a prototypical setting for the direct encounter of otherwise separate social groups, served as a backdrop for self-portraits as well as for varied portrayals of “the others”—whether crew members, guests, or chance encounters. The subjects photographed range from a yacht party near Samoa, Christmas aboard a warship in the Red Sea, a transport of convicts in the Levant, Admiral Tegetthoff’s captured cannons in the Baltic Sea, to the far-from-glorious daily routines of the crews.