Zita Oberwalder

Zita Oberwalder does not use any particularly prepared – quasi re-programmed – cameras. She does not try to add anything to photographing, nor does she omit anything from it. Technically her photography is pure and unaltered, respectively right there where it was before the digital revolution: unplugged.

Accordingly, her photographs at first glance function just as photographs usually do. They have focus, perspective, confines. Oberwalder does not intend to utilize the limited possibilities of her cameras ad nauseam in order to reach the boundaries of the last possible non-redundant picture. She disrupts the principles of photography in a much more fundamental way because she reconsiders its maxim. This is shown by the relationship of her photographs and the displayed objects and events. Oberwalder does not photograph objects in order to capture them, to freeze them. Actually, she aims past the objects and events, focuses upon the secondary ongoing, the fringe of those motifs that are generally deemed worthy of portrayal.

Zita Oberwalder

Therefore, her pictures are under the pressure of a push from the outside. As personal memory pictures, her photographs reach a mnemonic quality that goes far beyond simple didactic coherences. They follow a logic that does not have to justify itself, but simply functions. The scenes that she creates for the imagination of the spectator are precarious places ‘somewhere in-between’. Her pictures do not brag loudly, but spread a murmur that is full of traces of a variety of stories. Oberwalders pictures support and carry each other as one. Once photographed, they become a part of a personal archive and are free as such to break out from their original contexts and to recombine associatively. Even when she photographs architecture, her métier is never architectonically static, but fluid and contingent.

Zita Oberwalder (Kimberly Edwards)