© Edgar Lissel
Fotogalerie Wien Währinger Straße 59, 1090 Vienne Autriche
Experiment, research, invention and exploration – these are keywords for this year’s theme of focus TECHNIQUES, MACHINES & METHODS – Artistic Processes of Image-Making, which has been developed by the curatorial Team at Fotogalerie Wien in collaboration with artist and photographer Thomas Freiler. Nowadays, with the seemingly final shift from analog to digital photography and now that photography appears to have become something that is “taken for granted” and is “easily accessible”, artists who construct their own machines drawing upon old preindustrial methods and exploring basic photographic parameters are increasingly emerging. This three-part exhibition series focuses on the inventive and unorthodox artistic methods and processes in image-making.
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© Beatrix Bakondy © Thomas Freiler
When John Herschel titled his lecture “Notes on the Art of Photography” and presented it to the Royal Society in 1839, not only did he introduce the name for this new invention, the discourse around that which could be called the “photographic” was also initiated: on the one hand, a process based on rational laws of chemistry and optics and yet on the other hand, an apparently magical appearance or a specific manner of representation producing what could be recognized as “photographic” images. The second part of this year’s thematic focus with the subtitle Media Explorations exemplarily refreshes this discourse by uniting four ostensibly very different artistic positions in this exhibition. Is that which we believe to be photography really actually photography? Where could a line be drawn to differentiate photography from other image-making processes? Do the pictures that present the invisible in pictures of magical spectral quality then truly turn out to be the result of rational technological development, able to be analyzed and broken down into simple and basic patterns of color systems and rules of projection?
