‘Pictures for Everyone’: Foto Arsenal Wien Opens to the Public

This week, Foto Arsenal Wien opens to the public. Vienna’s first dedicated institution for photography, it is led by artistic director Felix Hoffmann, an established scholar in the medium and former chief curator of C/O Berlin. Foto Arsenal Wien inaugurates its 1,000 square metres of gallery space, located in Vienna’s third district, with two tone-setting exhibitions: ‘Magnum: A World of Photography’, drawing on more than 300 photographs from the world-famous photo agency’s archives, and ‘Simon Lehner: Clean Thoughts, Clean Images’, the first institutional solo by the young, Vienna-based artist, known for his works of concatenated images and memories. Foto Arsenal Wien evolved from a government initiative to establish a media literacy centre in Vienna in 2022. ‘Pictures for Everyone’ is the institution’s mission statement, a declaration of its ambition to stimulate greater interest in and dialogue around photography and lens-based media in a city celebrated for its Klimts and Schieles. Can Hoffmann break through Vienna’s conservative tastes? And what is the purpose of a medium-specific museum today?

Charlotte Jansen Why did you become especially interested in photography?

Felix Hoffmann I studied art history and cultural science, and I always work between these two approaches. During my studies, I came across a fascinating historic practice whereby people would take a last photograph of a family member who had just died. They would fix the deceased in chairs, make them up and even inject their eyes to keep them open. It was kind of a remembrance practice. While certain photographic theorists, including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, posited that mortification happens through the medium of photography – that pressing the button of a camera cuts time – I found these death pictures to mean the opposite: they wanted to make the dead come alive again.

CJ How did that scholarly interest lead you to work in photography museums?

FH After graduating, I got a fellowship to work in several German museums and, due to the way things are structured in Germany, I was fixed in a photography box from then on. But I’m more interested in photography as a system than I am as a medium.

CJ Foto Arsenal Wien launches this month with two exhibitions, the larger of which is devoted to photographs from the Magnum archives. This feels a rather traditional choice to kick off the museum’s programme.

FH The question of what to start with is always complicated. Do you make exhibitions for yourself, for your own bubble, or do you try to reach a wider public? My team and resources are limited – there are only eight of us – so I have to consider what we can manage while also supervising a construction site and developing the museum’s infrastructure.

I am fully convinced that good content can be a bridge: we need to persuade people to enter the museum because they have heard of Magnum and they know Robert Capa, then we can surprise them with something else. Vienna is a conservative city and it’s going to be necessary to work like this as an institution for the first decade. I would have loved to start with an exhibition by Zanele Muholi that raises questions about cultural heritage, sexuality and gender, but if only two people come to the show then who are you engaging with that questioning? Everything needs to come at the right moment. I am here to change something for the better, to bring ideas to the city, but it takes time. I wanted to start with names that are well-known locally.

CJ The Magnum exhibition focuses on analogue techniques and archives. How do you hope to surprise people?

FH Magnum is a wonderful example to explain the circulation and distribution of images. The exhibition contains 18 case studies that show how archival practices developed from 1947 on, as well as how members of Magnum created their own archives, such as Susan Meiselas’s Kurdish Migration Archive and Russell Miller’s political archive on public protest in Poland. These explain how the selection process happened over contact sheets and through the printing process, and how images were distributed in magazines and newspapers before the television era.

CJ This distribution system you refer to feels distant today.

FH We are trying to explain how power dynamics are implemented through photography, how pictures become part of the economic, political and socio-cultural system. What kind of images have been stored in archives and are not accessible anymore tells us a lot about this process. When we talk about the current political situation, we have to talk about aspects of power and what pictures are doing to us. We need to prepare the younger generation for the future. One of the museum’s goals, through our exhibitions and educational programme, is to explain the role of photography and lens-based media and their impact on us.

CJ How did the photography scene develop in German-speaking countries, and why is there a need for a photography museum in Vienna now?

FH A lot of famous photographers came to Austria in the 1980s, building up the scene in Graz, and an interesting magazine culture grew out of that: today, Austria has three photography magazines. However, in Vienna, there wasn’t a real locus for photography until the Foto Wien festival was launched in 2004. The biennial was part of an initiative to connect a number of cities through the European Month of Photography. In the early 2000s, there were 12 or 14 members; now, only six remain: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Portugal. I like that European idea, but I am focused on winning more local audiences and creating a new kind of hub through the institution.

Vienna has a great tradition of 19th- and 20th-century art but, compared to other cities, it has some lacunae in terms of contemporary art. It’s the second biggest German-speaking city, but there is no photography market here, there are no commercial galleries dealing with photography. What I did at C/O Berlin was to think about how to encourage commercial galleries and other institutions to engage with photography. Here, my aim is similarly to bring photography more fully into the wider discourse of the commercial system.

CJ Foto Arsenal Wien is funded by the state. Could that be a problem for you?

FH Foto Arsenal Wien is 100 percent publicly financed. There is no mentality in Austria of private money or corporate funding to support this kind of initiative, which can make cultural work quite complicated. Here, it is understood that everything is very much supported by the government, just as it is understood how important culture is to everyday life. This is one of the reasons it has been interesting for me to move from Berlin to Vienna, to learn from this culture, which feels close but also very different.

I have complete freedom in what I do, but there is always the question of why and how a city or a society should support an institution like Foto Arsenal, and I want to make sure there are people coming through the doors. I will always question how relevant we are, what we are needed for: it’s important to keep that in mind at the launch of a new place with a new infrastructure. We have to warm up the space before we can go deeper into the discourse.

‘Magnum: A World of Photography’ and ‘Simon Lehner: Clean Thoughts, Clean Images’ are on view at Foto Arsenal Wien from 22 March to 1 June

_{Main image: Marc Riboud, An American young girl, Jan Rose Kasmir, confronts the American National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam march, Washington DC, USA, 1967, gelatin silver print, 49 × 60 cm. Courtesy: © Marc Riboud / Fonds Marc Riboud au MNAAG/Magnum Photos}