Reflektor Magazine

Magazine for self-published photobooks

#1/2018

Niko Havranek Markus Oberndorfer Klaus Pichler Agnes Prammer Reiner Riedler 1

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KLAUS PICHLER was born in 1977. After having studied landscape architecture, he has worked as a freelance photographer for international clients and is creating free projects. His work has received numerous awards, is widely published and was shown in many solo exhibitions both in Austria and abroad.

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The photograph is taken from the book This will change your life forever by Klaus Pichler.

The book artistically examines the current post-truth era and various forms of new age esotericism as well as pseudo sciences through a series of self-experiments by the artist.

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»Anybody with a burning passion for photography is welcome.« interview_ WTF is Reflektor?? Austrian photographer and co-founder Reiner Riedler

provided some answers to VRENI HOCKENJOS and MICHAELA OBERMAIR,

What does Reflektor stand for?

Reflektor is not just one thing but has several aims. First of all, it is a platform for self-published photobooks run by photographers. Rather than taking their book project to an established publishing house, more and more photographers are choosing to publish their work independently. Reflektor acknowledges this trend, one can even see it as a reaction to this current development. It acknowledges the advantages of self-publishing and the fact that many of the most innovative and artistically daring photobooks emerge from the self-published sector. As such, our ambition is to promote such noteworthy and high-quality photobooks and artist books by offering them a home.

Why do self-published photobooks or artist books need a ‘home’ as you call it?

The crux is that while it has become all the easier to produce a photobook on your own, it also has become all the harder to make your work stand out, to reach out to people who might like it. There’s just so many of them that good ones easily get lost in the shuffle. Not least thanks to social media, marketing for photographers and artists in general has become a lot easier but at the same time also much more time-consuming – to the extent that it takes away time and energy from our creative work. So with Reflektor we support each other in that, i.e. we make use of each other’s networks and contacts and when one is on exhibition or at a photo festival, they not only promote their own work but also that of other Reflektor members.

Can you tell us more about the advantages of self-published photobooks from your own experiences as photographer? Why did you choose self-publishing for yourself?

My previous books were all published by publishing houses.

Yet, when I was working on my most recent book, Memory Diamonds, I felt it was more appropriate to publish it myself.

In Memory Diamonds I took a more conceptualist approach using a lot of found footage, private snapshots of people, and I wanted these photographs to be pasted onto the pages. Some publishers were willing to do it, but that kind of manual labour would have made the book incredibly expensive and I didn’t want that. The advantage of self-publishing is, no doubt, that books can be produced at a much lower cost – not least because you can do a lot of things yourself.

As a photographer or artist, you also have much more control over the production process, over the graphic design, the quality of the paper, the printing, and you can even go ahead and bind the books yourself if you want. This gives you an artistic liberty that you don’t have with a publishing house – at least I never did.

Memory Diamonds was the first book published under the Reflektor label. Why not just publish it solely under your name?

While I felt that self-publishing was the right way to go about with Memory Diamonds, I could see that publishing houses, needless to say, can offer some major advantages, namely their distribution and marketing system. And I wanted both: the liberty of a self-published photobook and the network, channels, and name of an established publishing house.

This is when the Reflektor idea was born. With a couple of colleagues, namely Christoph Lingg and Johannes Lehner, we decided to establish our own independent ‘label’ and build a reputation and network of our own. Technically speaking, though, Reflektor is not a proper label. We are not a publisher, the books that are promoted under the Reflektor name are still self-published by the individual photogra-

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phers. At the moment this also entails that we do not have a distribution system in place yet but hope to set one up in the future.

Still, the driving idea behind Reflektor is nevertheless significantly bigger or more ambitious than simply providing a tool for the promotion of self-published books, as is indicated in the Reflektor motto “Photographers for Photographers”. Could you elaborate on that?

When we founded Reflektor as a non-commercial association in the spring of 2017, we felt it was time to not just find ways to promote each other’s work but to have an exchange among like-minded people and support each other, to build up a group where we can benefit from each other’s skills and knowledge and networks. So Reflektor is also based on the belief that together as a group, we can accomplish a whole lot more than individually, where everyone keeps to themselves. In a sense, it is a bit like an artists’ collective even though we are not, because we do not want to be an exclusive club but an open and dynamic group. At this stage, we are about 25 members based mostly in Vienna, Austria, and the group consists not only of photographers but also of photophiles, if you will, that is, graphic designers, academics, and curators, who all share a passion for photography and a willingness to contribute something to the group. It works a bit like a modern barter trade and this collaborative approach feels absolutely crucial and modern.

On a concrete level, what are some of the activities Reflektor engages in?

We typically meet once per month where we discuss our creative work, collective projects, and business strategies.

Among the various outreach activities we do, it is worth mentioning for instance that some of us will visit the photo festival in Arles and represent Reflektor at the opening week.

Reflektor will also participate in the Photobook Week Aarhus at the beginning of October and support their first dummy award competition. A lot more things are planned or in the making, so it is very exciting to be part of it and see where it takes us. To be honest, Reflektor really is just at the begin-

ning, a lot is still open and undetermined but in this lies great potential. I very much embrace this openness.

What do you have to do to become a member?

Reflektor is first and foremost but not exclusively for professional photographers. But really, anybody with a burning passion for photography who believes in our collaborative model and is willing to explore new ways together is welcome to join our group. You can become a member after a sitting member nominates you, but people are also welcome to nominate themselves if they would like to be a part of Reflektor. To become a member, you do need to be approved by the group. You do not necessarily have to attend our meetings in person since we also have a vivid online exchange: This way even people outside of Vienna are able to join us, in fact, we warmly welcome international members!

Who can publish via Reflektor? And how?

You don’t have to be a member. Everybody is welcome to submit their manuscript for a photo- or artist book via our website. Whether or not it is accepted is a collective decision. At this stage, we even accept self-published books that are already published, though our goal is, of course, to exclusively promote Reflektor books.

REINER RIEDLER, born in 1968, is an Austrian photographer who received his formal training at the Viennese College for Photography and the Danube University of Krems. As a documentary photographer, his work investigates the interaction of human beings and their environment. With his socially committed approach, his photographs seek to challenge and expose our underlying value systems in an ever-changing world. As a traveller, Riedler visits the periphery of our habitats, always searching for the fragile beauty of human existence with its desires and abysses. In his conceptual projects, he targets our ways of seeing and the nature of photography more generally.

Riedler’s work has been published in numerous books and has been shown at photo festivals, galleries and museums around the globe.

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Agnes Prammer:

Idiot Hats centerpiece_introduced by VRENI HOCKENJOS

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he title of this book, at least the “Hats” part, seems to say it all. Agnes Prammer’s Idiot Hats features a surprising number of photographs of what, mostly, appear to be different types of hats. For example, there are a lot of baseball caps in a variety of states; some wet, some dirty and some sun bleached. Unlike the product shots of hats we find in advertising, these hats are not only aged and randomly placed, they don’t even appear very prominently in the photographs. They are more like alien objects, visitations to the frame, or remnants of something. But what?

I met Agnes, a fellow Reflektor member, over a coffee to talk about her book. The project, she explained, came about during a round-the-world trip. As an artist book, Idiot Hats exists only as a limited edition of eight copies. Agnes designed and bound them herself, as she typically does. Of the eight copies, half have a neon-pink bookend paper, the other half, neon-orange.

The hats in Idiot Hats appear strewn about a variety of almost abstract surroundings. In some we see rocky moonscapes, some replenished with water, others saturated with colour – a brilliant yellow contrasted with a deep blue-black. The moonscapes are predominantly close ups of hot springs, which due to their high mineral density form exquisite lines and patterns in the brightest colours. In their formal simplicity, the images in Idiot Hats could be aerial views of snow-covered mountains, or oceans, rivers, if it weren’t for the hats.

The formal minimalism of these images is paired with the absence of explanatory comments. Readers are left to their own devices, and questions. Only in the imprint are we given a subtle clue to situating these images. Here we find a place name and a date: “Yellowstone National Park”; “June 19th 2016”. Yellowstone National Park of course is a household name. The internet tells me it is volcanic in origin and presumably the oldest national park in the world. It is also visited by some 4 million people per year. That’s an average of 11.278 visitors per day. On June 19th 2016 Agnes was one of them.

Agnes told me all these hats were lost by visitors to the park. Most were blown from their heads by the wind. It happens so frequently, she said, there are even signs in the park warning people to watch out for their hats. In the evening, park rangers with six meter long poles try to collect the hats that have flown away during visiting hours.

Agnes’ work is often politically informed, dealing with current threats posed by globalisation and climate change for example. With the hats in Yellowstone National Park, she draws our attention to the effects of mass tourism on the landscape. But rather than pointing at others accusingly – “those stupid tourists who can’t keep track of their things” – I get the sense Agnes’ gaze is more compassionate and

inclusive, less judgemental, than that. Agnes seems to be expressing a sincere confusion over “us” humans and how we unintentionally damage or destroy places we visit to appreciate and enjoy.

Agnes’ focus on hats in her photographs of Yellowstone Park is in clear opposition to the volume of snapshots taken of such prominent sites by tourists. A stereotypical tourist, taking snapshots at Yellowstone Park would edit the hats from the frame as something threatening to the beauty of the scene, like a piece of litter. The monotonous shots of the lost hats are a kind of “anti-tourism” as much as a rejection of the well-established photographic canon of majestic landscape views of National Parks, perhaps most notably

by Ansel Adams. Idiot Hats is far removed from being a fancy coffee table book on the natural wonders of Yellowstone Park.

The tourists’ hats that are left behind become a kind of souvenir in reverse. The merchandise culture of the national park shops was something Agnes sought to address. As a result, she made from the photographs that featured in the book a game of memory. Finding the matching pairs, Agnes laughed, is quite a frustrating task because the images look so much alike. As such, the memory game edition, stresses even further the exchangeability of the images and the sheer number of lost hats. At the same time it also adds lightness or a playfulness to the images, emphasizing the (tragic) comical aspect of the hats having lost their owners, that now look so deserted and out of place.

Idiot Hats is not a loud book, but an intimate one. Its form beautifully correlates to its subject matter while a sense of melancholy hovers over each scene. The absence of the hat owners is so pertinently present. As such, the images convey a sense of loss and our constant confrontation with loss, either as small as hats or as large as a healthy living environment. In that sense, Idiot Hats is about the fragility of nature as well as the fragility of humankind. But it is also about paying attention to what we do, to the little things which stand for something much bigger. Idiot Hats, if you will, issues an invitation to us to take a little bit more care of our world and of ourselves.

AGNES PRAMMER was born in 1984 and attended the Academy of Fine Arts and the College for Photography and Audiovisual Media (Graphische) in Vienna. Her main interest is in artist books, which she meticulously makes herself. In addition to 17 books, her photographs have featured in a wide range of other publications and exhibitions. Prammer uses a wetplate collodion process in many of her photographic works. Language and text also feature prominently in her more conceptual pieces. She also regularly teaches courses at the Graphische.

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Revisiting Sunset Strip in dialogue with_ MARKUS OBERNDORFER about his photographic

journey through Hollywood 50 years after Ed Ruscha.

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EVISITED started in late 2015 with a desire to question the medial parameters of 360 degree video, which as a practice began to establish itself more and more at that stage. My aim was to draw attention to the fundamental shifts that took place between 360 degree video and the two main media of our time – photography and film.

By creating an interactive media installation, I wanted to allow the audience to experience these differences first hand.

My interest in 360 degree video is the result of a natural succession within my media-reflexive work up until now. But also more generally, I am fascinated by changes that occur over longer periods of time. That is why I was looking for a place as much as a work of art which I could take as point of departure for my exploration of 360 degree video in REVISITED. In order to create a viewer experience of medial and topographical developments over time, I not only needed a place where a “then and now” or a “before and after” could be staged, but I needed a place that already existed as a representation, i.e. that had already been captured by older media, such as photography and/or film.

I found Ed Ruscha’s seminal photobook “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (1966) to be the ideal frame of ref-

erence for my project. The book encapsulates the spirit of the 1960s in a daunting way and was also in itself highly experimental, exploring the limits of photography and photobooks. In the shape of a fanfold, Ruscha created a panorama of the buildings on the already then famous part of Sunset Boulevard leading through West Hollywood by mounting an automated 35 mm camera on a pick-up truck.

It was a kind of Google Street View avant la lettre apart from the fact that Ruscha only recorded one specific sideways view or field of vision, not an all-round gaze.

Half a century after Ruscha’s photographic journey down Sunset Strip I returned to the very street in Los Angeles, primarily known for its nightlife, hotels, and billboards, to once more render these 2,4 kilometers in a mediated and media-conscious way through 360 degree video. To focus attention on the spatial and medial differences in the juxtaposition of the two endeavors, I kept as close as possible to Ruscha’s set-up and course of action. As such, my work could be viewed as a re-enactment and continuation of Ruscha’s performance from 1966 which results in a juxtaposition of multiple discrete media practices, timelines, and perspectives.

THE THREE-PIECE MEDIA INSTALLATION REVISITED starts with Ed Ruscha’s book from 1966 and ends in the virtual 360 degree video environment of the Sunset Strip from 2016.

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Apart from the topographical changes that have taken place over the last 50 years, I am above all interested in the experiential value and the perception of these different representations of an actual space reproduced by visual means. What happens to the viewer and why? What are the qualities of each medial representation, what are the differences?

From photo collage to 6DoF One crucial difference between the two-dimensional, static visual space of the printed photobook and the three-dimensional dynamic visual space of the 360 degree videos lies in the limitation of the field of vision, i.e. the segment that is shown. This selection of perspective or view is absolutely central in the composition of an image, and while in photography or film, it is the producer of the images who has the power to define this — in Virtual Reality and 360 degree video, the power shifts to the consumer who becomes an active co-producer of the (final) images.

In regard to the composition of the images, Ruscha chose quite a radical approach in his documentation of Sunset Strip. Instead of consciously selecting and composing each photograph, as carried out earlier in a first unsuccessful attempt, he minimized his influence through human or artistic agency by refraining from manually pushing the shutter. By mounting the camera in a fixed position onto a pickup truck and using a serial timer, the exposures are spatio-temporal fragments of a strictly mechanical or automated process. As such, the result is a visually static space predetermined by camera position, perspective, point in time and the rhythm of traffic. Viewers of Ruscha’s photographic recreation of Sunset Strip cannot alter these given parameters retrospectively. They are however given the possibility to open and close the pages of the fanfold book and deter-

mine the rhythm with which their gaze moves through the preselected panorama.

To record my 360 degree videos of Sunset Strip, I mounted a cube with six cameras on a pickup truck and later on stitched the images together. Yet in contrast to Ruscha’s photo collage, viewers of the video cannot determine the pace with which they view and hence travel through space. In a 360 degree video, viewers however are given much greater power to choose the cutout that they want to see within the 360 degree environment, also known as the six degrees of freedom (6DoF). The power thus is transferred from the producer of the images to the person consuming them. Depending on how viewers move their head, new image sequences are instantaneously compiled in the field of vision of the VR headset. As part of my three-piece media installation REVISITED, every one of these unique sequences that are created in real-time by the person wearing the headset can be witnessed on a TV-monitor by everyone else looking at the installation. Every viewer who is willing to embark on this journey through the history of provided mediascapes, starting with an original copy of Ed Ruschas book from 1966 and ending in the virtual 360 degree video environment of the Sunset Strip from 2016, thus also becomes a protagonist and active part of the overall performance.

The afterglow This dialogue between two original works and my continued reflection have led to additional projects and creative explorations of the 360 degree videos and their source material.

Under the title “REVISITED Source Footage Collages” and “Collage in the Age of Automation” I examine temporal, spatial, contextual and performative qualities of the installation and its contents. In particular, I have sought to raise questions in these works that Ruscha did not consider or that were not central for him, not least also because they were technically not feasible in the 1960s, at least not without considerable effort. To give an example, I investigated the possibilities of creating seamless panoramas of the storefront plane (à la Ruscha) from video source footage instead of photographs. Also, I looked into what options there are to translate movement. How could I artistically visualize the driving dynamics of the four 360 degree videos I had made in a two-dimensional and static, visual space? The panoramas of spacetime created in such a way depict objects not only based on their volume but also on their extent in time and space.

Using the Sunset Strip as a point of reference, the multiple projects of REVISITED thus offer a complex examination of 50 years of development of media and generally highlight the influence that time and its concepts have on us, our environment, its representations and ultimately, our experience and perception.

MARKUS OBERNDORFER was born in 1980 in Austria and studied Art and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He works with a primary focus on photography and audiovisual time-based media, occasionally writes essays and uses performance, objects, additional material, and spatial installations. His projects are usually of a conceptual, interdisciplinary and media-reflective nature. They scrutinize what has been documented and how. They have been published in books and/or were shown at festivals, in museums and galleries.

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In Formation (working title) book in progress_ How do great photobooks come about?

To get a glimpse of the creative process we asked NIKO HAVRANEK to share his thoughts and give us a sneak preview of his book project in the making.

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o find new motives for my work as a street photographer, I often go to public events and I enjoy immersing myself in the crowd. Allowing my eyes to wonder is an important part of my creative process. What I’m looking for are things that surprise me, that challenge my habitual way of seeing: tiny things like the gesture of a person, or an odd colour combination that came about in the moment.

After noticing a rather odd display of dance shoes in a shop window the idea to this project was born. The elaborate make up and the effort involved in making oneself look „beautiful“ coupled with the style of clothing fascinated me.

Through a former classmate, who has been dancing for a long time, I gained access to the scene and the opportunity to accompany a group during their trainings and tournaments.

After the first tournament I attended, I realized that I wanted to focus on the dynamics within the group. What caught my attention was to see the enormous pressure that rested on each member of the group to contribute to the team effort. Every move must be on point, because the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

I would like to accompany the team for another season, to document more situations, and then to choose which pictures I would like to work with.

My plan is that the project will be published as a book in about a year from now.

Without any question, I find that a photo book is the ideal medium to show my pictures. The viewer has more time to look at a book than when the images are exhibited in a gallery or on a website. The graphic design is also an exciting aspect for me – particularly given that the aspect of choreography is of course vital on the content level as well. The layout and sequencing I plan to do myself with the help of graphic designer. I‘m curious to see where this project will lead me, and what form it finally takes.

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NIKO HAVRANEK, born 1987, is a freelance photographer living and working in Vienna.

He studied photography and graphic design at the Graphische and participated in the “Freie Klasse� of the Academy of Fine Arts, both located in Vienna. His work mainly centres on street photography, collages of archival footage, and drawings. On a subject level, he focuses on his immediate environment, distance and proximity in human relations and the presence as well as impact of beliefs, symbols and rituals.

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Join the family www.reflektor.org  ReflektorPhoto

IMPRINT: Verein REFLEKTOR, Grüngasse 27/6-7, A-1050 Vienna/Austria, ZVR 1818366940 ı Managing editors: Vreni Hockenjos, Thomas Licek ı Images: Michael Appelt (p. 4–11) ı Editorial team: Clemens Kneringer, Michaela Obermair, Werner Streitfelder, Georg Zinsler ı Proofreading: Alistair Fuller, Susanne Höfler ı Art-Director: Markus Zahradnik ı Graphic design: Schrägstrich Kommunikationsdesign Printing and production: Clemens Kneringer, Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehranstalt, printed on Xerox iGen 4 XL ı REFLEKTOR magazine is published twice a year ı Edition: 500 copies, July 2018 ı Copyright: All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission

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