︎
LEA SZRAM

E

K

»A photo album is on the one hand a highly staged construct, on the other hand dilettante and pragmatic. This can be seen, for example, in the choice of pasted pictures: What we find in the albums is limited to the harmonious, representable moments of life. The motifs are filtered, negative motifs are always left out. A blurred snapshot, on which the motif is hardly recognizable, is consistently pasted in—after all, you paid for it. The pictures are pasted in playful formations. But if a picture does not fit completely on the page, it is simply cut off. It’s exactly these details that make the amateurish charm for me. The clash between perfection and unpretentiousness, guided by subjective priorities.«

The book ›Im Privaten‹ attempts to trace the peculiarities of private photography and its containers. It takes up the linear but erratic narrative strand of a photo album and illuminates the subject kaleidoscopically from various perspectives: A pool of 42 photo albums from various decades was examined and evaluated according to criteria of content and form. Discussions were held with experts who have different relationships to amateur photography. By evaluating the photographic material, alternative criteria of order, meta-photographic groups and image pairs were generated. The textual and analytical narrative strand is thus accompanied by an associative, visual level.

THE PROJECT WAS SHORTLISTED FOR THE ›FOERDERPREIS FÜR JUNGE BUCHGESTALTUNG‹, 2019.

(back)