Camera Austria International
125 out now
Featuring:
Nan Goldin in conversation with Tobias Zielony
Maren Lübbke-Tidow on Seiichi Furuya
Kaucyila Brooke on Allan Sekula
Dan Byers on Joachim Koester
Column by Alanna Lockward
The point of departure for the issue at hand originates with the history of Camera Austria itself. In 1989, the publishers had the idea to confer an award (of which there were very few at the time, even internationally) to honour artists who have made “a noteworthy contribution…to Camera Austria since 1980.” The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz was thus presented for the first time in 1989—to Nan Goldin. All artists that we are (once again) introducing in this issue have, like Nan Goldin, been recipients of this award: Seiichi Furuya (1993), Allan Sekula (2001), and Joachim Koester (2013).
Three contributions by Nan Goldin have been published in our magazine since 1988: a letter from Christine Frisinghelli to the artist (1988), the facsimile of a handwritten obituary for Cookie Mueller (1992), and, not until issue No. 50, a text by Peter Schjeldahl about her portraits (1995). In a remarkable way, Goldin long resisted the coupling of text and image that is so characteristic for our magazine. German artist Tobias Zielony met with Nan Goldin in Berlin in January 2014 for a conversation that now, after many years, has once again opened a context for her artwork. But even this discussion does not primarily touch on photography or art; it deals with people, their stories and fates, with drugs, love, and AIDS.
Seiichi Furuya counts among the founding members of Camera Austria. A portrait of his wife Christine graced the cover of the first issue of Camera Austria. Maren Lübbke-Tidow writes about a pivotal work by Furuya that was created between 1981 and 1983 in Austria. Staatsgrenze / Border can be read as an attempt at surveying the space to which his migration to Europe led him, where Furuya has now been living for over thirty-five years, though still remaining a foreigner. Against this background the series gains topicality, especially because it makes it possible to project onto one another differing concepts of ”border.”
The fact that Allan Sekula plays an important role in our work is likewise demonstrated by the fact that four of his contributions were published in our magazine between 1988 and 2002. His critique of photography has always implied criticism of capitalist and postcapitalist society. Perhaps this is the reason why his work in the United States has seen little resonance to date, as recently lamented by Benjamin Buchloh: “The very criteria of this exclusion give us an astonishing insight, underscoring the fact that total depolitization appears to be the precondition of cultural recognition…” (Artforum International, January 2014). We asked Kaucyila Brooke, an old friend and colleague of Allan Sekula’s at the California Institute of the Arts, to write a personal text about his work.
The artistic work of Joachim Koester has also served as a reference point for us in previous years—regarding questions about the relationship between image and knowledge, as well as image and history. Various projects by the artist have repeatedly dealt with revisiting neglected, almost forgotten events or historical contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His works often feature elements of an obscure, irrational, subconscious, or repressed nature as related to modernist development—emphasising its significance for that which we call modernism. “…he locates precise sites at the intersection of predatory lending practices, speculative capitalism, and a particularly American approach to the buying, selling, and acceptance of debt,” as Dan Byers notes in his essay about the series, “Some Boarded Up Houses” (2009–14).
In the current issue, Alanna Lockward starts her series of essays, which will make up the Column section for this year. Her project “Decolonial Aesthetics/AestheSis” provides an important extended framework for the discourse on modernism and its production of visibilities.
Camera Austria International
published quarterly, 112 pages, German / English
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