Artist statement | Vienna as Trace

My photographic practice is grounded in literary science rather than in visual representation.

I approach photography not as image-making, but as a form of reading and writing the world. The city functions as a text. The photograph functions as a trace.

Drawing on phenomenology and deconstruction, particularly the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, I treat the photographic image as ontologically incomplete. What appears in the frame is never presence itself, but what remains after presence has withdrawn. The photograph is not evidence of what was, but a residue of an encounter that is already past. Delay is not an error in this process. It is its condition.

Vienna is central to this practice because it exists as a palimpsest. Historical layers coexist without resolution. Imperial architecture, modernist ambition, bureaucratic rhythm, touristic repetition, and everyday routine overlap as sediment rather than narrative. I do not photograph the city as spectacle or identity. I photograph it as something that has already happened.

From literary structuralism and post-structuralism, especially the work of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, I adopt the principle of intertextuality. No photograph stands alone. Each image enters an existing archive of images, symbols, and expectations. Rather than attempting to escape clichés, I work at their edges. My images operate as misreadings. Meaning arises between photographs through repetition, contradiction, and erosion.

Time in my work is not treated as a decisive instant. Influenced by narratology and the concept of duration articulated by Gérard Genette and Henri Bergson, I construct time across series. I return to the same locations. I repeat viewpoints. I allow minor deviations to accumulate. The photograph becomes a temporal cut that implies before and after without resolving either.

Authorship in this practice is deliberately weakened. Following post-authorial theory, meaning is not anchored in intention. The photographer is not a narrator but a function within the system that produces images. I avoid explanatory captions and authorial statements inside the work. The act of photographing itself becomes one trace among many others in the city.

Affect enters the work not through message, but through rupture. In the sense articulated by Barthes’ concept of punctum, certain details may wound the viewer, though they cannot be planned or controlled. I preserve banal, marginal, and accidental elements because they allow this possibility. What matters is not clarity, but openness.

Ultimately, my photography operates as a non-verbal literary practice. It does not seek to represent Vienna. It seeks to read it after the fact. The images do not claim truth. They register delay, residue, and displacement. The work insists that meaning is not captured. It is deferred.