Werner Schnelle (born 1942 in Vienna) is an Austrian photographer.
Werner Schnelle (born 1942 in Vienna) is an Austrian photographer.
Werner Schnelle was born in Vienna in 1942, and has lived and worked in Salzburg since 1965. [1] A freelance photographer since 1987, his artistic work is primarily concerned with various special photographic techniques such as the instant camera, the photo-, chemi- and lumigram, [2] [3] camera- and negative-less photography and in-camera negatives. [4] He has also worked with large Polaroid images. [5] Schnelle's works are mainly created in the studio and deal with the process of photography itself in a media-reflexive manner and often "unique photographic pieces" are the result of his artistic work. [6] [2]
The central elements in the work of Schnelle, whose "abstract works occupy a singular [photographic] position within Austria", [7] are always the medium of photography itself, the properties of light and space and of movement and time, and the traces that objects leave in the image under the influence of the processes inherent in photography. [8]
Schnelle's approach to photography is deliberately analog, thereby tying it to the origins of the medium, and refers to an appropriation of the world that only exists in analog photography in this way. [9] Analog photography provides an "authenticity" - for example through not being able change the in-camera negatives after the shooting process - but also a "persistent tension" through coincidences and experiments that the chemical processes make possible. [10]
Kurt Kaindl locates the interests of Schnelle's photography in the "explorations of the instrumental, chemical and optical foundations of photography [and in] the basic interest in pictures and their esthetic and poetic qualities, which find their validation only in the viewer". [11]
Margit Zuckriegl, who has curated several exhibitions of Schnelle's work and written texts accompanying his publications, says of Schnelle's photography: "Werner Schnelle's photographs always reflect the conceptual approach of his work. [...] Schnelle's photographic oeuvre is characterized by an experimental character and a concrete signature. Light, space and time form the constants in an intensive creative process that oscillates between experiment and calculation." [12]
80 works from Schnelle's "Fotokonzepte" series are in the collection of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg; [13] other works are located at FOTOHOF>ARCHIV, [14] Sammlung Spallart, [1] Polaroid Collection Cambridge/Massachusetts, [5] Art Collection of Salzburg Government. [15]
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