SALZBURG.- With »It’s Yours, It’s Mine: Seven Relational Portraits«, FOTOHOF presents an insight into the work of Austrian photographer Mafalda Rakoš. At the core of her projects—most of which unfold over extended periods of time—are questions that emerge from a mode of looking at the world that is at once photographically documentary and anthropologically investigative. Portraiture serves as the recurring aesthetic and medial point of departure for artistic experiments that explore the potential of photography to engage with complex social discourses. In Rakoš’s work, the image of the Other emerges through an expanded perspective. In dialogue with her protagonists and co-authors, she transcends the literary, scholarly, and artistic tradition of the first-person narrative. The collaborative process that unfolds brings together elements of documentary practice, art therapy, performance, and anthropological research in an effort to render visible something inherently intangible—the thoughts and emotions of women* and non-binary people—within broader systemic, economic, and historical contexts.
Underlying this approach is a conception of photography whose significance does not derive solely from a single-perspective representation of specific social, political, or economic realities. Rather than constituting the endpoint of a documentary practice, Mafalda Rakoš’s images can be understood as visual condensations of the relationships that develop between the photographer, her protagonists, and ultimately her audience.
In »The Civil Contract of Photography« (2008), Ariella Azoulay understands photography not merely as a means of producing finished images but as a producer of social relations that equally encompass the photographer, the photographed person, and the viewer. Meaning is generated not only in the act of photographing but within a network of reciprocal rights, expectations, and responsibilities. Photographs thus invariably produce a web of social relations from which ethical and political responsibilities arise for everyone involved. This perspective shifts the focus away from the question of what an image depicts toward how relationships are constituted through the act of photography and what forms of participation or exclusion it produces.
It is within this conceptual framework that Mafalda Rakoš’s photographic practice can be situated. In her work, the camera becomes not an instrument of appropriation but one of social engagement and subtle political commentary. She creates spaces dedicated to encounter, dialogue, and shared authorship in the context of social and political injustice. These spaces belong to the women* and non-binary people—friends, strangers, and the artist’s sisters—who, each from different positions and with different means, have taken up the struggle against patriarchal systems while collectively resisting patriarchal logics.
The long-term relationships that underpin these works stand in opposition to the logic of an extractive image-making practice in which people and »stories« function as consumable content. Instead, her works are the result of time spent together, mutual trust, and an ongoing engagement by all participants with the very conditions of their coming into being. Here, the camera serves not to legitimize a privileged gaze but to initiate dialogue, whose outcomes are not only images but also social relationships. In Mafalda Rakoš’s practice, photography thus becomes a relational medium whose meaning ultimately resides in the processes of collaboration and of becoming visible together.
