[ 1 | 2 | 3 ]

of inhabited spaces, which in turn leads to the employment of variously broadened research methods. As a result of this concern the staging of images has been ever more decisively pushed into the background.
One way in which some photographers have reflected the debate in their practice - and it is one which in view of the universal and overwhelming deluge of images has to be taken seriously - has been to produce photographs that do not have a subject in the accepted sense. Their work is characterized by images verging on the monochrome, by pages of content-free organizing systems which can be arbitrarily reproduced, by series of technical test cards for colours or shapes, by sets of abstract lay-out templates of the kind only used as aids to photographic composition. All these fly in the face of what seemed to be the basic and evident distinguishing characteristic of the photograph- the fact that it is firmly fixed to a subject and to a specific moment in time connected with it.
The programme of the Fourth Austrian Triennial on Photography will pursue the possibilities made available by the contemporary photographic image

which allow one to focus on the compressed image file of a "picture postcard" (showing something other than a picture postcard subject). The phenomena - be they global or local, central or peripheral - which characterize the complex nature of urban space stand out as central to the debate and to its visual embodiment in the works of art produced for the Triennial. Is photography, surrounded as it is by the dazzling displays of illusionary spaces and the moving pictures - the shallow images of advertising stills and video clips - capable today of publicly embarking on the task of creating a general aesthetic language, an "imagetext", which can replace the old kind of visual representation by a new structure of transformation in which form and content are closely linked?

Since its inception in 1993 the Austrian Triennial has pursued a variety of topical themes, inviting artists to create images specifically for the topic. This year there will be twenty artists from all over the world, who will be invited to contribute one picture each.

>> more