Impulses

The OstLicht Collection as it stands today did not emerge out of a predetermined concept. Nonetheless, the motivations and interests that have driven the collecting activity have become increasingly apparent in the profile of the collection’s holdings, as it has evolved over the past three decades. Indeed, a key impetus came from the 1990s when, against the backdrop of advancing digitisation, photography as an analogue process began to wane as the common practice – prompting Peter Coeln, then an advertising photographer, to give up his photo studio. Leading media theorists spoke of the »end of the era of photography«. At the same time, the exploration of the medium that had such an unprecedented influence on our visual culture did gain a huge amount of traction. It is clear today that, even as a digital process, photography not only remains relevant, but its potential uses have even expanded with the changes in technology, as it merged with new functions in the era of social media.

Both, the prerequisite for and the symptom of that lasting impact is the sheer diversity of the production and dissemination contexts of photography that appeared soon after the first practical processes and cameras were introduced. It has served as a technical documentation process, as a medium of both art and science; it has also shaped our everyday lives, as an individual occupation and as a commercial service – and since the early 20th century, also as a collective experience of reception via the print media. In the course of its history (which therefore includes contradictory stories), photography became a relay for interplays and transgressions between different social and discursive fields, the boundaries and self-conception of which began to shift with the emergence of the first technical image process.

Contexts

The outlined perspective on photography for instance is illustrated by OstLicht’s extensive holdings of 35-mm-format photography, which became a main vector of image culture. Technological innovations, as hand-held cameras and 135 film rolls, enabled image compositions capable of evoking authenticity in a new way. In the Cold War era e.g., photo reportages were put to the service of a propaganda whose credibility was founded on the (supposed) evidential character of photographic documents. Thereafter, it was these very concepts and effects of journalistic photography that artists were able to put to their own uses: Another focal point of the collection is given over to the photographic works of the Vienna Actionists, who commissioned press photographers to record their performative events. For art historians and, indeed, the art market, these photographs constitute Actionist’ works while the authors of the photographic images often remain uncredited.

Another category shift is that individual protagonists and movements of press photography, foremost among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, represent art photography par excellence after decades of its reception history. Such links are also apparent in the main topic area of Polaroid photography. The instant photography process with its specific aesthetic and pragmatic implications came into widespread use far beyond the field of artistic or professional photography; in fact, it became a forerunner of digital smartphone photography.