What do I remember when I think about Manfred Willmann?

Photo: Tena Starčević

Over the past years, I came across his works at several exhibitions; sometimes they were collective, more often independent. On one occasion, I saw a wall covered with numerous photographs from his most famous series Das Land, taken between 1981 and 1993. Shot in a completely simple way, using flash even in daytime conditions and outdoors, the photographs of the Austrian landscape and rural events are a simple story about the people he encountered, the situations he noticed, and for some reason considered interesting. It is a photographic study of society and its relationships, established a long time ago. It is in these scenes that Willmann’s incredible ability to notice details is revealed, such as the silver metallic colour of a short feather jacket on a girl whose body language betrays a strange discomfort during shooting, and which I have remembered all this time.

In the scenes Willmann observes, he shows no need for commentary, while irony or an empathetic attitude are not demonstrated. Everything is as it is – a woman washing her dirty feet in a basin in the evening after working in the fields, a smiling girl sitting under a tree, a waitress in a flowered skirt passing by the terrace of some tourist resort, as well as the pig he first shot almost smiling, only to see its severed head in a plastic bucket afterwards. There is no pity or particular sympathy. There is no criticism or positivist attitude, it is just life, happening in its elementary forms, throughout Austria and elsewhere.

The great success of this series is based on the directness and comprehensibility of the mediated content, as well as the fact that nothing on these recordings has been edited. I perceive the realism that we notice in these photographs, as well as in the other series, a small portion of which are presented on this occasion, as documentary research; documentary that is direct and owes its success to the precision of the gaze. Maybe luck. In any case, to a reasonable dose of wit that often keeps our heads above water. And while Das Land is a story of people, Willmann’s latest series, 2017/18, which counts hundreds of shots, is dedicated to the animal and plant world – at least judging from what we see. In the exhibition, this world is symbolically shown as a coexistence of a cat overseeing the kitchen, and a mouse that ended up in the traditional way, as brutally as after a long battle.

It seems as if there is no moment that did not deserve to be photographed, while conversations and social moments with him have often ended up in the viewfinder of the small camera that he always carries with him. The way he records is unobtrusive; there are no grand gestures, oversized lenses and superiority that technology sometimes lends to the cameraman. For many of the situations, I wonder how it is possible that he recorded them; why people believed him and gave him a part of their intimacy and everyday life.

Among other things, I remember Manfred for Camera Austria, the magazine and the gallery space, but above all – as part of the people, him, Christine Frisinghelli and Seiichi Furuya, from whom I have learned a lot and who have influenced the level of criteria to which I myself aspire. Thanks to this knowledge and the numerous important connections that began to be established between Graz and Zagreb since the early 1970s, for which we thank Peter Dabac, the brochure of this exhibition includes a text by Albert Goldstein from 1981, written on the occasion of Manfred’s exhibition in the Arhiv TD gallery. It reminds us of that important period, as well as of the fact that, at the end of the day, everything depends on how much personal effort we put into what we believe. Manfred, Christine, as well as Pero, invested their lives in photography. And when we look at the photos that surround us, I am convinced that we do understand why they did it, and why they are still doing it.

We extend special thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum for the realization of the exhibition.

SKR

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