SALZBURG.- FOTOHOF in Salzburg presents a deeply personal yet universally resonant exhibition by Austrian photographer Leo Kandl, whose new series “Brünner Straße” opens on December 4, 2025. The show, on view through January 31, 2026, revisits the urban landscape of Floridsdorf, the Vienna district where Kandl grew up and where his parents once ran a small shop selling paints, varnishes, and household goods.

Across decades, Kandl has quietly cultivated a body of work that observes the ordinary rhythms of daily life. Rather than chasing dramatic moments or eye-catching compositions, he turns his lens toward the subtle, unadorned scenes that shape the experience of a city. In Floridsdorf—a district once defined by rural culture and later by its working-class identity—Kandl finds a living stage where long-time residents and new arrivals move through streets, squares, and transportation hubs with the understated choreography of everyday existence.

In “Brünner Straße,” Kandl captures the social and architectural evolution of the 21st district. His images trace the layered history of the area: from grand turn-of-the-century apartment buildings with rows of ground-floor shops, to the utopian municipal housing of “Red Vienna,” to the modest homes and family businesses that emerged during the postwar rebuild. Even the monumental distribution centers—massive, windowless structures rising where empty marginal land once stretched—become part of this unfolding narrative.

Though people appear throughout the photographs, Kandl’s focus is less on individual portraits and more on the situations they inhabit. A passerby crossing a street, a group pausing at a tram stop, a lone figure navigating an intersection—each person becomes part of a larger societal mosaic. For Kandl, the camera is a tool of silent communication, allowing him to step into the urban landscape not as an outsider but as a participant. His photographs neither judge nor romanticize; instead, they document the multicultural reality of contemporary Vienna with empathy and clarity.

Crucially, Kandl does not search for nostalgia or traces of a lost world. Despite his personal ties to the neighborhood, “Brünner Straße” is conceived as a portrait of the present—a precise, curious, and open-hearted record of how a city lives today.

Born in 1944 and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Leo Kandl continues to live and work in Vienna, where his quiet approach to photography remains a powerful means of understanding social space.