Alles ist Fotografie

Photography beyond Photography

 

Alles ist Fotografie (Everything is Photography) is a tribute to a medium which is omnipresent like no other, and which helps determine almost all aspects of our lives—and will continue to do so.

“How much of everything is photography? A swarm of silver salt particles or of zeros and ones, the basis for tags, a blank film or not available, a projection onto a focusing screen, a screenshot, an abundance of Photoshop layers, a hole in a sheet.”

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Hans Hollein had a similar thought about architecture in 1968, when he published a visionary manifesto with the belligerent title Alles ist Architektur (Everything is Architecture) in the journal Bau: he casts doubt on the traditional definition of architecture and demonstrates, passionately and sometimes entertainingly, with about 80 illustrations from the contexts of art, architecture and fashion, as well as depictions of technological developments and our everyday lives, how everything can be architecture in the broadest sense and the potential that lies in cross-disciplinary thought.

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Hans Hollein had a similar thought about architecture in 1968, when he published a visionary manifesto with the belligerent title Alles ist Architektur (Everything is Architecture) in the journal Bau: he casts doubt on the traditional definition of architecture and demonstrates, passionately and sometimes entertainingly, with about 80 illustrations from the contexts of art, architecture and fashion, as well as depictions of technological developments and our everyday lives, how everything can be architecture in the broadest sense and the potential that lies in cross-disciplinary thought.

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Alles ist Fotografie is a tribute to this manifesto, transferring it to photography.”
 

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Alles ist Fotografie is a tribute to this manifesto, transferring it to photography.”
 

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Alles ist Fotografie is a tribute to this manifesto, transferring it to photography. As in the case of Hans Hollein, Alles ist Fotografie is also divided into two parts: a text closely following his model in the sense of a post-modern re-writing, and a playful visual section consisting mainly of artists’ contributions but also with a search picture where ten errors have crept in and a QR code which opens a literary snapshot.

The roughly eighty illustrations trace an arch from the most elemental conditions of photography to consequential visions of the future—from the pinhole camera to the data image and from the paper image to the cloud. Photographs are in analog and digital archives, consist of 16.8 million colors, or are not actually photographed but computer-generated. 
 

Gregor Eggenberger
Alles ist Fotografie (Everything is Photography) 

Produced as an artistic contribution on the occasion of ab_bilden
With a text by Gregor Eggenberger and Ruth Horak
68 pages, approx. 80 illustrations 
33 x 23,7 cm, brochure with partly fold-out pages
500 copies
German with English insert
Publisher: Österreichisches Institut für Photographie und Medienkunst – EIKON, Vienna 2020
ISBN 978-3-904083-04-1

Illustrations by 280A, Marina Abramović, Josef Albers, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Ernst Caramelle, Thomas Demand, Gregor Eggenberger, Ólafur Elíasson, Joan Fontcuberta, Sonja Gangl, Philipp Goldbach, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Felicity Hammond, Lamia Hilwé, David Hockney, Hans Hollein, Gottfried Jäger, Claudia Larcher, Naomi Leibowitz, Jacinthe Lessard, Harald Mairböck, Andy Mattern, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Julian Palacz, Pascal Petignat, Timm Rautert, Stephan Reusse, Jörg Sasse, Adrian Sauer, Günther Selichar, Stefanie Seufert, Cindy Sherman, Susan Sontag, Simon Starling, Eva Stenram, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hito Steyerl, Sofie Thorsen, Sophie Thun, Anna Viebrock, Tamás Waliczky, Gillian Wearing, Sinta Werner