New Pictures. A New Era. The History of Early Photography in Salzburg (1839–1878). A guest appearance of the Salzburg Museum

Gathering the findings of a multiyear research project, the exhibition New Pictures. A New Era offers extensive insight into the history of early photography in Salzburg. It spans the decades from the infancy of the new medium in the 1840s to its becoming an integral part of everyday social and cultural life in the 1870s. With these bookends, the project as a whole also covers a defining period in the history of Salzburg, during which a town dominated by the prince-archbishop’s seat reinvented itself as an urban setting of bourgeois culture.

Early photography both recorded this transformation and gave it symptomatic expression: before the lens, Salzburg’s transformation emerges in photographs of people, buildings, and urban and natural sceneries; behind the camera, a new era in visual culture is disseminated in the city and the surrounding countryside by photographers who adopt each successive technological innovation. As its programmatic title suggests, the exhibition sheds light on both dimensions—on changes in front of as well as behind the camera—presenting a wealth of fresh knowledge about photographic images and their authors.

Reconstructing the history of the invention of photography in the local perspective, the presentation showcases the earliest extant visual documents to illustrate how it revolutionized motifs and ways of seeing and representation in Salzburg no less than elsewhere, establishing itself as the medium of the bourgeoisie by catering to its representational ambitions and curiosity with new pictures.

A publication will be released in conjunction with the exhibition.