SALZBURG.- The Museum der Moderne Salzburg honors Leo Kandl, the recipient of this year’s 15th Otto Breicha Award for Photography, with a comprehensive monographic exhibition.

Leo Kandl (b. Mistelbach, Austria, 1944; lives in Vienna) has been making visual history for more than four decades. A reticent and sensitive observer, Kandl has traveled the world and returned with pictures that attest to his encounters. In the street, in bars and cafés, in railway stations and taverns, Kandl’s camera paints a portrait of society and creates a documentary record of the world around him. Careful to avoid the pitfall of voyeurism, he is always keenly attuned to the social relations that define the milieus he explores. “Kandl’s photographic insights into a world on the peripheries of urban society and carefully groomed lifestyles are now rightly regarded as classics of the history of photography in Austria,” Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, emphasizes. Margit Zuckriegl, the chairwoman of the award jury and curator of the exhibition, has selected around a hundred prints from the museum’s holdings as well as recent works to present an overview of Kandl’s oeuvre since the 1980s. By honoring Leo Kandl with this year’s Otto Breicha Award for Photography and the exhibition Leo Kandl. People and Places— Photographs from 40 Years, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg pays tribute to an eminent photographic oeuvre.

The photographs in the Weinhaus series from the 1980s tell stories of people on the margins of society and bear moving witness to life in the twilight of cheap wine bars, railway station fast-food joints, and dives along Vienna’s outer beltway. In the 1990s, Kandl studied the culture of individual styles of dress as a vestigial form of human existence. His “sports coat” photographs are documents of the wearers’ simultaneous presence and absence. Passersby and chance encounters are a recurrent motif in Leo Kandl’s oeuvre. He started out capturing anonymous portraits in the streets; in later years, he also arranged to meet his sitters by posting classified ads and personals. Around 2000, he launched the series Free Portraits, in which the pictures are the result of extensive preparations and appointments with volunteer “models” he has never met before. A study visit to Iran in 2003 led Kandl to take an interest in urban landscapes and peripheries. The anonymity of places and the “atmosphere of the overlooked detail” also inspired his visual research in Moldavia and Ukraine. Closer to home, he roams Vienna’s neighborhoods, taking pictures of unspectacular streets, residential developments from the 1970s, kiosks, and tobacconist’s stores in which he glimpses geometrical composition and architectural serendipity.

A brochure with essays by Sabine Breitwieser and Margit Zuckriegl will be published on occasion of the award ceremony.

Curator: Margit Zuckriegl, Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Otto Breicha Award for Photography 2015—Statement of the jury
Created more than thirty years ago, the Otto Breicha Award is awarded by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in consultation with the Breicha family. The jury— Christa Breicha, Philipp Otto Breicha, Matthias Hermann (recipient of the 2013 Otto Breicha Award), Walter Moser (Albertina, Vienna), and Margit Zuckriegl (Museum der Moderne Salzburg)—unanimously nominated Leo Kandl for this year’s award, explaining its selection as follows:

Leo Kandl (1944 Vienna) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna before turning to photography in the 1970s. He is a member of the first generation of auteur photographers in Austria. His generation established a clear photographic language in the tradition of “straight photography” and was very active in the newly established photo galleries and institutions. Kandl’s series Weinhaus (1979/1980) has become part of the classic pictorial inventory of Austrian photography, exemplifying his combination of rigorous composition with socially relevant subjects. Kandl’s keen eye and his personal involvement in the issues he investigated heralded a new artistic approach in his work from the late 1990s onwards: his Free Portraits (2000–) present a seismographic snapshot of a global society in the throes of change. Kandl’s street portraits are created in interaction with completely anonymous people. His interest in their personal situation and how they present themselves has resulted in a photographic atlas of great scope and diversity. Kandl is thus a leading exponent of postwar Austria’s strong and independent classical photography scene, while also treading new ground by taking a modern pictorial medium and updating its traditional language to give it a topical and contemporary form.