Tell Me What You See: Cat. Museum der Moderne Salzburg / Kunsthalle Krems

Christian Skrein, born in Vienna in 1945, now lives in the Salzkammergut. He began his career as a photographer in 1963, and he dates the start of his collection to 1968. Today, this collection is renowned worldwide for its pioneering role in the reception of amateur photography. Over the years, Christian Skrein has developed a practice as a collector, where subjects such as compositional formations, shadow play, forensics, and portraits as well as curiosities are represented by high-quality artistic as well as documentary works. His focus goes all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s and, certainly partly due to his own photographic practice, to contemporary reportage photography. In the 1960s, he was the youngest photographer working for Vogue magazine, and became known for his portraits of the Viennese bohemia of the time, the result of direct personal contact, which include names such as Christian Ludwig Attersee, André Heller, Hermann Nitsch, Walter Pichler, Arnulf Rainer, and Oswald Wiener. The exhibition and publication though focus on the photo-historical as well as formal criteria in a narrative chronology, which result in a short history of photography in iconic images.