PAUL KRANZLER: Homeland

Father’s Slide Show in the Living Room, with Slides He Took in the States in the 1970s, Hörsching 2008. Photograph © Paul Kranzler

Gregor Exercising His Show Horse Dusty Diamond, Ybbsitz 2008.

Photograph © Paul Kranzler

Father with Mother’s Fox Fur in his Walk-in Wardrobe, Hörsching 2007
Photograph © Paul Kranzler

Austrian photographer, Paul Kranzler, was one of 100 photographers chosen to participate in Review Santa Fe 2011 with his series, Brut. "In Brut, Kranzler turns his lens on his own family, choosing 120 images from among the thousands he has taken of his family since 2004, and providing revealing captions about family history and the realities of everyday life. “In the living room my father likes to show slides he took in the States in the 1970s,” writes Kranzler. “He says that the town of Traun is Austria’s equivalent to Los Angeles, and he’s not wrong.”

“These are images of places and people I have known for a long time, whether related by blood or otherwise. And places and people who know those I know, and also people who I don’t know in places I have known for a long time. You become the way you are in your own environment. Relatives are an integral part of the genetic environment, and people, to whom you are not related and who become your relatives are always your closest environment. Indeed the people, places and landscapes of your own environment are always the most photographed motif in the world. Once you have been in a particular environment for a long time, it becomes your “home”, your “relationship”, your “family”, your “homeland”, your “cemetery”, your “prison”, etc. Perhaps one’s personal environment is four-dimensional: the three dimensions of space plus the fourth dimension, i.e. the emotion inherent to that (living/human) space.” –Paul Kranzler, BRUT, Fotohof edition

Paul Kranzler Website
La Lettre de la Photographie:
Review Santa Fe Part I / Part II