11.12.2008–25.01.2009
Exhibition at Café Cult #37

Christopher Steinweber
Good Morning Night

As part of the exhibition series at Cafe Cult #37 Christopher Steinweber presented his recent series “Good Morning Night.”

Staged beauty is often seen, but we do not always notice it – perhaps precisely because we do not know any different. Plants are planted, gardens are tended, everything is where it should be – where we like it. Mrs. Huber has new Geraniums. It is put on – artificial, staged.

Discolored apartment buildings are lost behind the dominant foreground, lighting shifts to the point of being surreal. Plants are moved into another light to show how we do not see them.
(Christopher Steinweber)

The presented works of Christopher Steinweber subtly weave two concepts of the appropriation of reality through photography. Steinweber reduces both the sense of time to a precisely defined window by taking his pictures in the twilight of early evening and the sense of space to discrete locations like urban spaces that are often described as „embarrassingly unspectacular .”

Christopher Steinweber does analog photography in medium format, a „time and space stirring” intensive technique that demands a lot of time and curious meandering. One might think of this as a paradoxical, anachronistic use of media in a digital age. A paradox, also because here a very young photographer outs himself as an odd, enlightened romantic by decelerating that which is left over from the accelerated world.
These images of grotesque urban spaces that have been artificially brightened and surreally shrunk through acceleration also depict the opposite: Steinweber is terribly unromantic, precisely because he freezes places, spaces, beyond normal use (no people can be seen) in the flash of semi-consciousness. An already artificially touched up world of leftover gardens, architectural niches, and florally decorated concrete conceived and conceptualized for the harsh shine of daylight. Steinweber’s works are precise photographic pieces of prose.
(Fritz Rücker)

www.steinweber.ch

Christopher Steinweber, born 1989 in Oberndorf, lives and works in Salzburg. Higher Technical School Salzburg „Art and Design“ since 2005, freelancer at Galerie Fotohof, Leica Galerie Salzburg and Salzburg Kunstverein.