Fritz Macho

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Macho self-portrait Alufabrik Lend

Fritz Macho (* 1899 in Lend ; † 1974 there ) was an Austrian photographer .

Vita

Macho was born the son of a baker , was a trained locksmith and committed socialist . He fought in Italy during World War I and then worked for 40 years in the Salzburg aluminum company in Lend. He was also drafted for the Second World War , but only for a short time, as his operation was considered essential to the war effort. Macho was married with two children - a son died in World War II. He died in 1974 and is buried in Lend.

photography

Fritz Macho bought a plate camera at the end of the 1920s and used it to take photos mainly in the vicinity of his home town, the Salzburg industrial town of Lend, which he rarely left in his life. Machos photography can be divided into two groups: on the one hand landscape and mountain photography , on the other hand portraying the inhabitants of the mountains - the herdsmen - and the surroundings of Lend. He was active in the in-house photo club and won several prizes at its exhibitions. Its historical significance is the authentic documentation of the people of his time and environment and their living conditions. He photographed people to whom he was probably very familiar, " devoid of any inwardness " and thus achieved, with self-trained photographic vision, " naively, so to speak, a progressive aesthetic ". Peter Rosei notes: “ The fact that he took these photos 'at all' is the remarkable thing for us. With them he could make no impression in his environment .; nobody cared about them. So he rarely copied them more than once. He actually only took these photos for himself. "

Peter Weiermair places the “worker photographer” macho in an aesthetic context with photographers like Dorothea Lange , Walker Evans , Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis , but with the difference that the intention of the macho photographs is unknown. Lange and Evans documented the American peasant misery on behalf of the Farm Security Administration , the task of the pictures of Hine and Riis was the "social indictment". Macho photographed the people as “theirs”, they are “part of his life context” - his approach is probably not socially critical. Precisely because macho seemed so involved in the life of the rural population, Timm Starl criticizes the classification as a "worker photographer" and would rather describe him as a rural photographer.

Regarding a lecture by John Szarkowski , Rüdiger Wischenbart sees Fritz Macho in his review of the book "Menschen am Land" as a photographer who uses the medium according to his " eccentric and original genius " and does not use the medium in the traditional form canon Seeks art . " It is a hallmark of the recordings of such a narrative photographer that he creates his work broadly. He needs a multitude of points of view and perspectives in order to represent his subject. He does not impose himself on the viewer, but spreads his material in front of him. He He also submits, as Szarkowski said, to the medium in so far as he takes up the possibility of trying out several variants in quick succession. He takes up his motif in modifications without subsequently increasing to a certain one of the perspectives produced as the 'valid' one It does not significantly curtail your statement if you take out a single element if a 'style flaw' occurs, as long as you leave the basic structure of your approach intact, as it is also manifested in the context of his pictures. "Wischenbart emphasizes here and in his Typing as a " narrative " photographer the tendency machos to work serially , which is depicted in the publication "Men in the countryside "has been neglected in favor of the effect of the individual image.

Fritz Macho's photographic estate is in the Fotohof and is managed by Kurt Kaindl .

Exhibitions

  • 1981. "Pictures from the 1930s". Fotohof, Salzburg.

Holdings

  • 2008 '' Traces of Light. Photographs from the collection ''. Lentos , Linz

monograph

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Koschatzky. The art of photography. Technology, history, masterpieces . Residenz Verlag. Salzburg, 1984. p. 455
  2. ↑ Peter Rosei. '' Alps and Inhabitants ''. In: Fritz Macho. '' People in the Country ''. Residenz Verlag. Salzburg, 1983. ISBN 3-7017-0276-4
  3. ↑ Otto Hochreiter. Rural life. To represent the farmer and the alpine landscape . S. 421. In: Association for the development of the history of photography in Austria (ed.). History of Photography in Austria . Exhibition catalog. Bad Ischl, 1983.
  4. ↑ Peter Rosei. '' Alps and Inhabitants ''. In: In: Fritz Macho. '' People in the Country ''. Residenz Verlag. Salzburg, 1983. ISBN 3-7017-0276-4
  5. ↑ Peter Weiermair. '' To the photography of Fritz Machos ''. In: Fritz Macho. '' People in the Country ''. Residenz Verlag. Salzburg, 1983. ISBN 3-7017-0276-4
  6. ↑ Timm Starl. Review. In: Photo history . 1st year. Issue 2. 1981
  7. ↑ John Szarkowski. American Photography and the Tradition of the Frontier . In: Christine Frisinghelli, Manfred Willmann (Eds.). Symposium on photography in the Styrian autumn '79 . Photo gallery in the Forum Stadtpark. Graz, 1979
  8. ↑ Rüdiger Wischenbart. Review. In: Camera Austria (No. 5). Graz, 1981
  9. ↑ http://www.fotohof.at/content.php?id=24&ausstellung=164&details=1
  10. ^ Exhibition on the Photography Now website

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Macho, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian photographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Lend (Salzburg)
DATE OF DEATH 1974
Place of death Lend (Salzburg)