SALZBURG.- Inge Morath has become famous for her impressive black and white portrait photographs and reportages of large cultural areas. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, FOTOHOF is showing an exhibition of her color works for the first time. Like many of her Magnum colleagues, she also took color photographs on slide film throughout her life. This was primarily for publication in illustrated magazines; however, she also repeatedly used individual color photos in her b&w picture books. She herself has said that she shoots color where she sees color.
For a long time it was very difficult and expensive to produce high quality exhibition pictures from 35mm slides. Only since the possibility of digitizing slides and printing them on baryta paper has a quality been achieved that has its place on gallery walls. In addition, the color works of Inge Morath are a valuable contribution to photographic history, which for various reasons has received too little attention up to now.
John P. Jacob, the first director of the Inge Morath Estate, compiled the color works for an exhibition in New York in 2009, and a large cross-section of them is now on display at FOTOHOF. The prints were processed and printed from the original scans in the FOTOHOF archiv. The image data was made available to the FOTOHOF by the Inge Morath Estate with the kind support of Sana Manzoor.
John P. Jacob attended FOTOHOF for the opening of the exhibition and gave a lecture the next day at the "Museum der Moderne Rupertinum" (where the exhibition Inge Morath & Saul Steinberg / Mask and Face is on view until June 4).
FOTOHOF archive also owns a large collection of documents on Inge Morath. To complement the exhibition, a biographical sketch will be compiled from them in the studio. Her color reportages will be exhibited in showcases in the original illustrated magazines of the 1950s. They will allow comparison with the color works in the main exhibition. On the walls will be some of her black and white vintage prints as well as text documents written by herself.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a double publication: "Wo ich Farbes sehe. Where I See Color" and "Mask and Face. Mask and Face - Inge Morath and Saul Steinberg" with texts by Andrea Lehner-Hagwood, Brigitte Blüml-Kaindl, Harald Krejci, Inge Morath, John P. Jacob, Kerstin Stremmel, Kurt Kaindl.