Christine de Grancy

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Christine de Senarcelens-Grancy (born 1942 in Brno ) is an Austrian photographer .

life and work

Christine de Senarclens de Grancy was born to a Protestant Berlin mother. She never met her father, who was a technician who carried out transport flights to the enclosed Stalingrad for several weeks during the Second World War and who fell three weeks before the end of the war in the Lüneburg Heath . Her maternal grandfather, Siegfried Wagner , supported as officer in Hitler - assassination on 20 July 1944 .

After stays in Berlin, the Lüneburg Heath and Bavaria, she spent her childhood and youth in Graz. There she completed an apprenticeship in ceramics, pottery and commercial graphics at the arts and crafts school with Hans Adametz . From 1963 she worked mainly as a graphic designer and art director in advertising agencies in Vienna.

After a stay of several months in Patmos , she began taking photos in 1965. An encounter with André Heller in 1970 led to friendship and cooperation. In 1979 she was hired by Achim Benning as a photographer for the Burgtheater . From the 1980s a series of illustrated books was created that dealt with European as well as African and Asian cultural phenomena. She preferred to walk on the fringes of so-called civilization. In 1983 she was in Western Sahara for the first time and subsequently documented the Tuareg and in 1987 the Polisario's struggle for freedom . In Russia she traced the Volga worlds , further photographic trips and long-term stays took her to Greece, Algeria, Kurdistan, Georgia and Niger, to Pakistan, China and Japan. In Vienna she explored the roof landscapes (1994) and the hidden world of Jews who emigrated from Iran (made in the 1990s, first exhibited in 2015 at the Jewish Museum Vienna ).

Exhibitions showed her works in Paris and Perpignan, New York, Tokyo, Beirut, at the Museum of Modern Art in Passau, at the Biennale in Turin and in Milan. She worked with well-known Austrian writers - including Barbara Frischmuth , Erika Pluhar and Gerhard Roth . The Viennese photographer Gabriela Brandenstein is one of her long-term friends .

On the occasion of the opening of her personal Christine de Grancy. On the spot in Vienna's WestLicht 2002, Vienna City Councilor for Culture Andreas Mailath-Pokorny emphasized her status as a storyteller. They tell stories of distant peoples and distant cultures, of people, their everyday lives and habits. “She is an ethnologist who investigates people and their living conditions with the camera.” Andre Heller gave the laudation and described Christine de Grancy as “Augnerin” because of “her perceptual abilities, her accuracy and the precious way of looking”.

Exhibitions (selection)

Publications (selection)

  • The Sahrouis - Sons and Daughters of the Clouds - from the Polisario's silent revolution , 1987
  • Signs of life , photographs from 1974 to 1986, 1987
  • Landscape for angels with an essay by Barbara Frischmuth, Molden – Edition 1981, ISBN 3-217-01223-2
  • A gentle birth experience , 1994
  • Hallodris and saints, angels and lemurs - figures on the roofs of Vienna , 1994, ISBN 3-85058-004-0
  • The Tuareg - Images of Women from the Sahara , exhibition catalog, 1999
  • East by Anzenberger (Part 2)
  • Erika Pluhar ; Hofmann and Campe 2004

Award

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Up and away !, Falter 29/02 , July 17, 2002
  2. ↑ a b c Renata Schmidtkunz : I tell life stories with my photos - In conversation with the photographer Christine de Grancy , Ö1 , March 17, 2016, 9:00 p.m.
  3. ↑ Austria Press Agency (OTS): Gold Medal of Merit of the State of Vienna for Christine de Grancy , June 11, 2002
  4. ↑ derstandard.at: A festival with a history swept under the divan , June 28, 2008; accessed on March 20, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Grancy, Christine de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Senarcelens-Grancy, Christine de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian photographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno