Fotohof, in Salzburg, is offering a retrospective of the Austrian photographer along with unpublished letters and texts.
Inge Morath, whose real name is Ingeborg Hermine Morath, was born May 27, 1923 in Graz, Austria and died in New York at the age of 78. Her childhood was lost very early under the debris of history. Like an angel with bent wings who understood what certain annunciations announced– found, when her parents’ land shook, how to reinvent the world, even that of the stars. She created the most original images of Marylin.
Forgetting the years absorbed by the monster, she knew how, through her photos, to chase away what smothered the flame of existence, and never lived it up, even in the middle of all the glitz and glamour. She crawled through the marshes of Manhattan and beyond to make images of haze. There was an amazement, but always in a minor world. Inge Morath did not “specularize” anything and never speculated on the improbable. The ocean of sentimentalism and the artificial was not of her doing. That is why her images take us back to the emotions of childhood. A dismissal pierces the webbing of time through her explorations where the most beautiful dolls seem to be broken.
Small, she had seen how the snow melted and the ring slipped. But she knew how to take herself in her arms and eyes just when the blue of the sky left to skim across the wastelands of the Bowery and the Village, close to cracking in the cold. Also cracking were her icons emerging from obliged poses. Her eye knew how to retain the fragility of beings and show what hid under the apparent insouciance. The black and white around which light wraps becomes the froth that weigh the soul when night and day cross.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret is a poet, critic, and lecturer in communications at the Université de Savoie, in France.
Inge Morath, Bilder und Briefe : Biografische Materialien aus dem Archiv
October 24, 2017 through January 13, 2018
Fotohof
Sparkassenstraße 2
5020 Salzburg
Austria
