Contributions to a History of Photography in Austria, volume 18

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

At the Vienna Camera Club, members of the upper classes and the aristocracy in fin-de-siècle Vienna indulged their love of photography as a common leisure pursuit, much in the same way that other pursuits such as cycling and skating had just come into fashion. A keen interest in matters scientific and aesthetic also emerged around that time, prompting a radical reorientation of photography as a technical medium. Through the dedication of the likes of Hugo Henneberg, Hans Watzek, Heinrich Kühn and others, the idea of sculpting images using light (as encapsulated in the term Lichtbildnerei) ceased to be the ‘purely sporting activity to which it had thus far succumbed’ – as the magazine Ver Sacrum adjudged to be the case in 1898 – and was instead ‘elevated to loftier artistic spheres’. The Secessionists welcomed amateur photography as a ‘confederate ally now no longer to be underestimated in the propaganda of the artistic attitude to life in the service of which we stand’.

Astrid Mahler is an art historian and curator of the Photographic Collection at the Albertina in Vienna.

Image 1
Albert von Rothschild, Eislaufplatz vor der Station Hauptzollamt [Ice Rink in Front of the Hauptzollamt Station], Vienna, 1890, albumen silver print, 8.1 × 10.3 cm, Austrian National Library/Picture Archives, Vienna

Image 2
Hugo Henneberg, Nach Sonnenuntergang [After Sunset], 1896, multi-colour gum bichromate print, 35.9 × 51 cm, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna

Image 3
Karl Dragutin Graf Drašković, Bettler [Beggar], c 1895, after a silver gelatin dry plate negative, 18 × 13 cm, Muzej za umjetnost i obrt/Museum of Decorative Arts Zagreb