SALZBURG.- The work of Tamara Horáková and Ewald Maurer exemplifies the developments that led to the establishment of photography as an artistic medium in the 1980s. Their early work is characterized by large-format canvases coated with Liquid Light, site-specific installations, and a media-critical reflection on political events. Central to their practice are contributions to conceptual and abstract photography, to the theoretical discourse on the “basics” of the medium, and to interpretations of the digital and analog specificities of imaging processes. Their extensive and materially “opulent” oeuvre (Werner Fenz) has received numerous awards and has been widely exhibited, published, and collected.

At Fotohof, Horáková and Maurer take us in large strides through the history of the medium: from Daguerre’s shoes to the era of high-tech laboratories shortly before their collapse, all the way to the look of the apps into which photography has shifted. 468 cm Russian Ice Cream stands for the “military special operation” in Ukraine, and a Face with Tears of Joy mocks the nature of photography in the age of AI.

Tamara Horáková and Ewald Maurer (born 1947 in Havlíčkův Brod/Czechoslovakia and in Fürstenfeld/Austria), studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; they live in Vienna and Nový Studenec.

Tamara Horáková and Ewald Maurer

In 1984, their first collaborative works emerged, marking the transition from painting to photography. Against the backdrop of photography becoming increasingly discursive in the 1980s, Horáková / Maurer began to approach the medium—one that has since undergone several fundamental transformations—in their own distinctive way.8 Over the following roughly 15 years, not only theorists but also artists engaged in a broad discourse on photography. Artists negotiated themes originating from the medium itself and described an introspective engagement with it, thereby bringing conceptual photography of the 1960s into the present. Horáková / Maurer made a significant contribution to this discourse on photography as a conceptual artistic medium through both their works and their publications, particularly through the theoretical volume “Image: /images – Positions on Contemporary Photography”.

In Large Strides Through the History of Photography

A pair of black leather men’s shoes with classic perforated ornamentation—Budapester, full brogue. An unknown person had left them standing on the pavement. Some would describe them as “broken in,” others as “worn out,” or even “run down.” Surely thousands of such shoes had walked the streets of Paris. Among them, those of the man who, one day in 1838 or 1839 on Boulevard du Temple, had his shoes polished—and by this circumstance became the first human being ever depicted in a photograph, together with the boy who earned his living as a shoeshiner, though his movements rendered him only blurred during the long exposure time. And certainly Louis Daguerre was also on his way—full of energy to continue working on the “marvel” that would change the world—heading to his studio to produce that image of the Boulevard du Temple which is now considered one of the earliest surviving photographs (daguerreotypes).

Ewald Maurer photographed the shoes in Paris in 1985 as part of an action by Horáková / Maurer at the Forum des Halles site, where they placed postcard-sized stickers bearing the inscription “vive la société.” At that time, Les Halles was the most modern temple of consumption in the nation, surpassing the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Centre Pompidou combined in popularity on peak days. The phrase “vive la société” echoes the patriotic slogan “Vive la France!” while simultaneously functioning as a critical commentary on consumer society. In retrospect, one recalls the first products labeled “Made in China,” marking the increasing influx of mass-produced inexpensive goods from the Far East. At the same time, the first shopping malls were emerging in Europe, symbolizing the shift toward a consumer society.

Together with the 283 cm-long chemigram, a small exposure test (“Liquid Light” on canvas), and the new text image “Boulevard du Crime”, “Daguerre’s Shoes” mark the beginning of the photographic age. If one disregards the camera obscura, known since the Middle Ages, natural scientists observed9 photochemical reactions for around 100 years until the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in 1826 in permanently fixing the first image that we now call a “photograph.” Experiments with light-sensitive substances—later given the appealing name “liquid light” by an American company—must have left numerous traces on tables and floors, making the intentionally created drips and streaks in the chemigram highly plausible.10 This “dripping”—one can hardly avoid using this term when thinking of Jackson Pollock—appears today, with the knowledge of how Horáková / Maurer liberated photography from its obligation to depict, like an early boycott of photography’s representational function. Instead of depicting something, the silver gelatin layer of the large baryta paper is covered with a dense network of white lines and spots, prompting one to speak of coagulated light carving its way through the silver (“Argenta”).11 In fact, fixer attacked the silver particles in the emulsion, while light blackened the surrounding paper.

Boulevard du Crime

In Daguerre’s studio overlooking the Boulevard du Temple, silver was likewise in use, later shaping the entirety of analog photography for the next 150 years. At the time, the boulevard was also known as Boulevard du Crime, as crime plays were predominantly performed in its numerous theaters, and Daguerre likely worked in one of them as a stage designer. Tamara Horáková recorded the key data of Daguerre’s photograph depicting the boulevard in note form: created on April 5, 1838, between 8:00 and 8:10 a.m., a laterally reversed image on an 8×6 Paris-inch silver plate. Today, little remains of it beyond reproductions, while the original plate—after an improper restoration attempt—has itself been transformed into a chemigram. “Disappearance was inherent to photography from the beginning. Preventing and controlling it was the aim of its inventors.”12

The text image of the boulevard narrows just like the photographed one and draws us into its depth, paved with tilted and distorted letters. It conveys information about Daguerre’s photograph—not in the form of buildings, trees, and shadows, but through information lying behind the image, such as sodium chloride, silver, and iodine, just as the informal name Boulevard du Crime also emerged from insider knowledge of the time.

Wien, NG40

The place where Horáková / Maurer engage with photography is their Vienna studio at Neustiftgasse 40. It is located on the mezzanine level of a late residential building constructed in 1910 according to plans by Otto Wagner, and from the very beginning it inspired them to create long series developed in correspondence with the space, the light, and the objects found there, or to transform what was found into an image, as in the series “TPX-Index”.13

This also includes the Bandes tests (test strips). H/M: “As a rule, the Swiss laboratory we worked with in the 1990s sent us several narrow test strips before producing a large Lambda print.” A typographical error in the lab resulted not in a strip, as usual, but in a nearly four-meter-long sheet. Mr. Julmy gave this mistakenly produced
print to his clients. He could not have anticipated the long series of works it would inspire. Since then, around 30 variations of this oversized “Bande test 1” (1998) have been created, inspired by both analog and digital photographic processes, such as inversion, which represents a digital simulation of the positive/negative reversal principle. Of the original motif—a “Less” office cabinet by Jean Nouvel for which the test strip had been intended—only a minimal trace remains in the Bandes tests variations.

One of the large “Bandes tests” as well as eight small variations are on display in the exhibition. The motif of the smaller variations is the aforementioned unexpected Bande test 1 (1998), which at that point had already been mounted behind acrylic glass. Attentive viewers will be able to spot, in the first image of the small series, the analog large-format camera used to reproduce the print, reflected in the acrylic glass. The subsequent Bandes tests are digital manipulations of a module. The interweaving of analog and digital processes, which Horáková / Maurer practiced not only in this series, is characteristic of a period in which digital processes increasingly replaced analog ones. The 552 cm-long “Bande_test_roll_03” is also based on an 8×10 inch Ektachrome image of photographic paper arranged in waves, but only through a long sequence of digital modifications was the reference to the object minimized to such an extent that an autonomous image emerged.

With computer-based image processing, the digital workspace joins the analog studio, bringing with it its own specific spatial structures—such as app backgrounds, tool palettes, and diverse possibilities for transforming images.

The “Grids” (2009) are based on a mask within image-processing software that defines an (as yet) empty image field. Isolated from its context, enlarged, and subjected to color and contrast modifications, the grid itself becomes an image, thus connecting to the modernist grid as a reduced compositional form: “With its coordinate-based flatness, the grid suppresses the dimensions of the real […]. The grid declares art to be a space that is autonomous and self-referential” (Rosalind Krauss). Bright green geometric patterns extend across a black background—the inverted version of the positive (pink on white) is hardly recognizable as a negative—just as the negative itself has little relevance in digital photography.

The tension between analog and digital takes shape in many of Horáková / Maurer’s works. In the diptych “Atelier/Infrarot” (2000), four infrared lamps generate a dense red light that spreads across the studio walls, parquet floor, and around the table. An image from the series “Lichtfeld ng 40” (1996) hangs on the wall, at the same spot where the incoming light from a streetlamp, refracted through irregular window glass, had previously been recorded. Only the blue image of a monitor interrupts the homogeneous red. Reduced many times over in scale, it repeats the view into the studio. A surveillance camera, positioned slightly above, transmits it. The
depiction of the studio space thus joins a long tradition of artistic interpretations of one’s own workspace using the familiar medium. Rare, however, is the variation in red: Henri Matisse’s “L’Atelier Rouge” (1911) and David Lynch’s “Red Room” (1990) in Twin Peaks may be similarly conceived—as a kind of Blue Box, only in red, onto which everything can be projected. That one print of the diptych was produced analog and the other digitally is revealed only by the printing data; by the year 2000, the reproduction quality of digital prints was scarcely distinguishable from analog ones.

Nový Studenec

The second studio where Horáková / Maurer work is located in Nový Studenec in the Czech Republic. Russia’s attack on Ukraine revived memories of the invasion of 1968. Among the political, geographical, and biographical themes—such as the restitution of property expropriated in the 1950s (Tamara Horáková, “Areas”, since 2008) or the observation of nocturnal insect flights (Ewald Maurer, “Like Hornets to the Flame”, 2015)—the work “RUSKÁ ZMRZLINA – EXTRA SMETANOVÁ” [Russian ice cream – extra creamy] also belongs to the themes emerging from the studio in Nový Studenec during the summer months.

The blue paper with the white knitted pattern once wrapped vanilla ice cream between two wafers.

Through the name “Ruská zmrzlina” and the reference to “extra cream,” the Czech product alludes to iconic Russian ice cream. According to the story, Stalin sent his Minister of Food, Anastas Mikoyan, to the United States “to study the booming food industry of the capitalist economic giant at close range.”14 Instead of milk powder, however, cream was used for Russian ice cream; strict quality standards were imposed, and it became an affordable mass product.

Horáková / Maurer scanned the unfolded packaging—some manufacturers, incidentally, covered the word “Ruská” with blue-yellow stickers at the beginning of the war against Ukraine—in order to reproduce it less illusionistically than photography would. The five sheets are assembled into a long print and differ only in their orientation (rotated 90° counterclockwise) and their expiration dates. Interpreted symbolically, one sees a Russia turning in all directions (including against its own citizens) and offering no expiration date for its costly war. Over the enticing promise of “extra creamy” lies the taste of bitter irony.

The “Screenshots” (2011) are a literal sequence of “screen” and “shots”: the basis is a photograph of an interior scanned at such low resolution that only a few large pixels remained visible on a laptop screen. This screen image was then photographed with a large-format camera onto 8×10 inch slide film. After development, Ewald Maurer repeatedly shot through the films with an air rifle, puncturing them and tearing the material around the impact points. Scanned again, these frayed holes were digitally closed using rotated fragments of the complementary color, causing the grids of the enlarged screen mask to shift against one another. On the Lambda prints, the printing data is displayed—almost like an additional signature of the processor, complementing the artists’ signature that represents the conceptual idea.

Salzburg, Fotohof

Finally, five emojis (“Face with Tears of Joy”, 2026) look down, laughing loudly, across the spectrum of photographic offerings in the exhibition space. Distorted by Horáková / Maurer and reduced to grayscale, the face of the laughing emoji takes on darker features, suggesting a dystopian vision: the self-confident ambitions with which AI-driven apps are increasingly entering photography and imagining replacing it altogether. At the same time, emojis carry an inherent ambivalence, as they are not only elements of harmless communication but have also been used as a starting signal—for example by Hamas in the attack on Israel in October 2024.

Within the tension between analog and digital, between chemigram and Photoshop grid—from deeply analog (still without capture) to digitally generated (again without capture)—Horáková / Maurer alternately affirm and reject photography, in parallel with the ongoing race between lens-based and generated images.

Ruth Horak