FOTOHOF archive Opening

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FOTOHOF archiv opens with an exhibition of works by Doug Stewart and Paul Albert Leitner
The basic idea of the newly founded Fotohof archiv is to create a broad-based collection of works by the photo artists represented. Such a collection should of course be comprised of the photographs themselves. But it’s not just about cherry-picking seminal works for an exhibition: it’s also about first prints, smaller versions of the photographs, and an overview of the series as a whole. Preliminary drafts and additional prints are just as important for the archive as the so-called first choice among the artist’s works. The aim of the archive is to document the artistic process in its entirety. And that of course includes the negatives and contact copies, or the original digital data illustrating the full breadth of the creative process involved. Other points of interest in a collection such as this include written drafts, texts, material documenting the history of the production and presentation, documents, and printed matter. Ideally, it is then possible not only to show and understand the artistic work, but also to gain an insight into the culture of the day.
 
Archive presentation of the photographs of Doug Stewart
In the 1970s American photographer and photography teacher Doug Stewart, together with Ina Stegen, established a highly regarded photo workshop at the Salzburg College. He was also the first teacher of photo classes at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. A number of photographers from Salzburg such as Michael Mauracher and Kurt Kaindl attended these courses. It was there that they gained their expertise in fine art photography, and they later went on to establish Fotohof. Which brings us full circle, with the first exhibition by the Fotohof archiv. Doug Stewart left a large cross-section of his photographic oeuvre to Fotohof. These photographs were taken mainly in the period leading up to, and during, his stay in Salzburg and his travels across Europe. These images were created at the interfaces between his academic work as an American teacher of photography, his activities in Europe, and his own personal interest in photography. Unsurprisingly, the sequences of images are just as diverse. Experimental series reflect his exploration of the photographic material. A number of methods now almost forgotten such as solarisation and special forms of tinting can be found alongside analogue forms of double exposure and montage, the complexity of which is now difficult to reproduce in the Photoshop age. The series of photographs which Doug Stewart entitled Photographic Street Theater, taken mainly in European cities, is a good illustration of the street photography genre that dominated the 1970s and 1980s; it processes the many impressions the photographer experienced on his travels and then passed on to his students. And then there is the extensive Uncle Ed series, which combines the photographer’s interest in the nude and the human figure, in scurrility and identity, with his studies of psychology. A shrill, fictitious family is created as an artistic conceptual work. Finally, the work Mit einer Dames features a particular reference to Salzburg: here Doug Stewart combines billboards of cigarette advertisements into a large series-based work. In its first presentation the Fotohof archiv is seeking to present the work of a photographer and, at the same time, document his relationship with, and influence on, European photography. Thus a mosaic of European photography culture is created by the personal and local history depicted in the photographs of Doug Stewart, by the photographs taken by students of the Salzburg College and featured at the exhibition, and the essays from the catalogue.
 
 
Archive presentation of the conceptual work of Paul Albert Leitner
Paul Albert Leitner is the ideal choice when it comes to the embodiment of the very nature of the archival process per se in Austrian contemporary photography. Whenever he returns home, Leitner, the constant traveller, goes on ‘office duty’, as he calls it, to sort out his thoughts and his photographs in a mountainous landscape of boxes piled high with thousands and thousands of meticulously labelled photographs, objets trouvés, newspaper cuttings, and texts. As the archivist of his own life Paul Albert Leitner has always lived in apartments that were, in fact, archives themselves. Analogue small-format colour photography is and remains his working method. And that ‘office duty’ also signifies a meticulous editing process, gluing the 7x10 cm machine prints onto coloured index cards with the sequential numbering of each particular film and the corresponding number for each photograph.
 
Each photograph is then given a title, at the very least a precise indication of the time and place, but often complemented with more detailed information. Leitner has a preference for the term Legende: image and text together are constitutive so that the photographs can be read and Leitner’s narratives are able to unfold. The individual photo is actually concrete poetry – with narratives, personal autobiographical and entire world histories created as a series of images or as a book. Kunst und Leben. Ein Roman [Art and life. A novel] is the title of his first book fundamental to his oeuvre.
 
 
For the opening of the Fotohof archiv Paul Albert Leitner is showing “A short meditation on the archive”, featuring two display cases, each with 20 or so of his index cards: one a light-footed selection on the spontaneously chosen theme of the ‘haircut’, the other photographs on Salzburg – referencing the location and pre-empting the project of establishing an Austrian photography archive at the Fotohof archiv. Several hundred Leitner motifs will represent an important contribution.
 
Of course the Paul Albert Leitner archive also contains text artefacts on the subject of archives – a riddle according to which system he locates and extracts them – labelled and highlighted with his own underscoring; we present a few of them as reading panels in the study room. With somewhat of an ironic twinkle we also present his new collages of stickers found in urban spaces, which allows us to ask the age-old questions: what makes art, art? Where are the limits of collectability? And are those limits merely a question of resources?