VIENNA.- The Albertina Museum is devoting a comprehensive presentation to the works of photographer Alfred Seiland (*1952), one of the first Austrian photographers to devote himself entirely to color photography. Seiland’s oeuvre revolves around his interests in various cultural spheres ranging from the East to the West Coast of the USA and on to the former territory of ancient Rome, to Austria, and to present-day Iran. His documentary photography stands out for its finely balanced colors and color gradiation in combination with the sharpest possible focus at all levels of a picture. The present Albertina Museum exhibition shows five of his major work series.
Seiland’s pictures reproduce the visual impressions that he has while on location taking them—and their consistently large depth of field accords equal status to all depicted elements, from the most prominent foreground motifs to those appearing farthest in back.
In the Footsteps of His American Models
Beginning in 1975, Alfred Seiland went on frequent trips to the USA, where he experienced the rise of color photography as an artistic genre and—in 1979—made his own decision to begin working only in color. Up into the 1970s, classic artistic photography had been the exclusive domain of black-and-white film, with color photography long having been scorned by artistic photographers due to its use in advertising and fashion shoots.
For his earliest series, East Coast – West Coast (1979–1986), Seiland traveled the USA taking precisely composed, atmospherically dense shots that reproduce specific lighting and spatial situations. This is the same America of neon signs, sweeping landscapes, and long roads that artistic color photography’s American pioneers had immortalized just a few years before. Seiland’s photographs are quite consciously set in some of the same locations as those by representatives of recent American color photography, who served as his great role models: Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston. In contrast to the Americans, however, the European Alfred Seiland was encountering a landscape that was culturally foreign to him. His photographs thus show the development of a deeply independent gaze on what (for him) were downright exotic-seeming motifs such as giant billboards, neon signs, and motels.
Realistic Heimat Pictures and Smart Celebs
Spurred on by magazine assignments, Seiland also began dealing more closely with the theme of Austria. The 1981–1995 series Österreich [Austria] consists of works that cast a gaze on Seiland’s own homeland that is neither nostalgic nor subject to any other type of distortion. These photographs much rather stand out for their realistic, un-embellished reproduction of reality.
And for an ad campaign of the newspaper Frank furter Allgemeine Zeitung (“Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf” [Always a Clever Mind Behind It]), which ran from 1995 to 2001 and won numerous international awards, Seiland photographed famous personalities—each shown in his or her own elaborate, specially conceived mise - en - scène.
Historic Locations in the Present
In a series begun in 2006, Alfred Seiland devotes himself to the juxtaposition of historic locales and contemporary life within the former territory of the Roman Empire, thus shedding light on the charged relationship between antiquity and the present.
And it is from this nearly 130-photograph work group, entitled Imperium Romanum , that Seiland has developed his latest series, which features present-day Iran and is being presented publicly for the first time in this retrospective.
