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»Please excuse my bad English but it is the only one that I have.«

That was what an old Italian colonel I once met at a NATO base in Kosovo opened his deliberations with. I would like to ask for the same leniency towards what I have to say on this website for the sake of maximum accessibility in the language of Shakespeare. Born in rural Upper Austria, although near a large industrial plant that shaped both the region and my family, I completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter in the mid-1990s. That particular choice was made for lack of a better idea after I had to face the fact that I was not a natural fit for the federal polytechnic, which I attended for one year with rather limited ambition and success.

While I was in the midst of my apprenticeship, many of my friends at home went off to university in Vienna. Having developed into a history buff, inspired by my grandfather, I decided to sit for university entrance exams and followed my friends to the capital. There, I earned a master’s degree in history and politics as well as a doctorate in modern history.

TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS

Coming from a family where every male member wielded some sort of photographic camera (mostly SLRs) when I was a kid, I guess it was only a matter of time before I developed a deeper interest in picking up a camera myself and snapping away. When I did—around the age of 17—my grandfather gave me one of his cameras, a fully manual Praktica MTL 5 SLR with a 50mm lens, made in the German Democratic Republic.

Growing up on a steady diet of classic Hollywood cinema, I had a fairly clear idea of perspective and composition. Much to my regret today, I showed no real interest in the technical intricacies of transforming that idea into a proper photographic image for a long time. So, in the past twenty-plus years, I have made every photography mistake possible at least twice over. But at long last, I hope I am finally somewhat out of the woods.

I have never managed to restrict my photography to one specific genre, aside from it being documentary— i.e., not arranged to taste (except for a handful of portraits I have taken), not cropped, unaltered in post-production, and always depicting a present and observable slice of visual reality. I don’t care whether it is a social scene or circumstance, a portrait, a detail, a landscape, an interesting shadow, a nice reflection, or anything else that captures my attention and intrigues me—I’ll take it all.

A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE PRESENT

As a trained historian and a great admirer of Timothy Garton Ash’s personal brand of writing—what George F. Kennan once described as „histories of the present“ along the borders of journalism and historiography—I am captivated by the notion of integrating a precisely defined form of documentary photography into that concept. I continue to explore and refine a theoretical and technical framework in that regard…

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