The lecture by Dr Anja Burghardt The Objective Camera? On the Representation of Other Ethnic Groups in Travel Photographs around 1900 proved to be a real crowd puller. Around 150 interested visitors went on a search for traces in the Museum of Photography WestLicht - accompanied by Anja Burghardt. She is a research assistant at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Salzburg and currently a research fellow at the IFK International Research Centre for Cultural Studies at the Linz University of the Arts.

The photographs from the National Geographic archive are an impressive document of expeditions. Landscapes, cities and the inhabitants of foreign countries are presented with - as it so often seems in photography - objective distance. In a comparison of the images in the exhibition with Western colonial photography and colour photographs by the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, Burghardt explored the question of how people, especially members of other ethnic groups, are portrayed. Are there photographs that preserve the subject status of the human being, i.e. the subject or object of the picture? The explosive nature of the topic quickly became apparent - a lively discussion developed after the lecture.

Photos: Christine Miess (WestLicht)