© Leo Kandl
Expositions du 31/10/2015 au 28/2/2016 Terminé
Rupertinum Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 9 5020 Salzburg Autriche
The Museum der Moderne Salzburg honors Leo Kandl, the recipient of this year’s 15th Otto Breicha Award for Photography, with a comprehensive monographic exhibition.Rupertinum Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 9 5020 Salzburg Autriche
Leo Kandl (b. Mistelbach, Austria, 1944; lives in Vienna) has been making visual history for more than four decades. A reticent and sensitive observer, Kandl has traveled the world and returned with pictures that attest to his encounters. In the street, in bars and cafés, in railway stations and taverns, Kandl’s camera paints a portrait of society and creates a documentary record of the world around him. Careful to avoid the pitfall of voyeurism, he is always keenly attuned to the social relations that define the milieus he explores. “Kandl’s photographic insights into a world on the peripheries of urban society and carefully groomed lifestyles are now rightly regarded as classics of the history of photography in Austria,” Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, emphasizes. Margit Zuckriegl, the chairwoman of the award jury and curator of the exhibition, has selected around a hundred prints from the museum’s holdings as well as recent works to present an overview of Kandl’s oeuvre since the 1980s. By honoring Leo Kandl with this year’s Otto Breicha Award for Photography and the exhibition Leo Kandl. People and Places— Photographs from 40 Years, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg pays tribute to an eminent photographic oeuvre.
The photographs in the Weinhaus series from the 1980s tell stories of people on the margins of society and bear moving witness to life in the twilight of cheap wine bars, railway station fast-food joints, and dives along Vienna’s outer beltway. In the 1990s, Kandl studied the culture of individual styles of dress as a vestigial form of human existence. His “sports coat” photographs are documents of the wearers’ simultaneous presence and absence. Passersby and chance encounters are a recurrent motif in Leo Kandl’s oeuvre. He started out capturing anonymous portraits in the streets; in later years, he also arranged to meet his sitters by posting classified ads and personals. Around 2000, he launched the series Free Portraits, in which the pictures are the result of extensive preparations and appointments with volunteer “models” he has never met before. A study visit to Iran in 2003 led Kandl to take an interest in urban landscapes and peripheries. The anonymity of places and the “atmosphere of the overlooked detail” also inspired his visual research in Moldavia and Ukraine. Closer to home, he roams Vienna’s neighborhoods, taking pictures of unspectacular streets, residential developments from the 1970s, kiosks, and tobacconist’s stores in which he glimpses geometrical composition and architectural serendipity.