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.

Thorsten Sadowsky (born 1961) studied history, philosophy, and ethnology at the University of Hamburg and received his doctorate in 1996. He was director 2006–2008 of the Kunsthalle Aarhus, Denmark; 2008 he was the founding director of the Museum of Western Art, Germany; from 2013-2018 director of the Kirchner Museum Davos; and since 2018 he is director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Thorsten Sadowsky is the author of numerous publications on classical modern and contemporary art. Kerstin Stremmel studied art history and German language and literature in Cologne and Bonn and received her doctorate in 2000 with a thesis on winged pictures. More recent photographic representations of classics of the fine arts. She works as a freelance author for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and teaches as a guest lecturer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich. Karl-Markus Gauss (born 1954 in Salzburg) is an Austrian writer and lives there. Besides his work as an essayist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he writes reviews and is editor of the magazine Literatur und Kritik. At the end of 2006 he was accepted into the German Academy for Language and Poetry.