Aglaia Konrad

From a Mountain Village to Vienna: Learning to See the City through Film and 35mm

Konrad grew up in a small mountain village near Salzburg and moved to Vienna at nineteen. She worked during the day and went to the cinema at night; later criticism has described the changing buildings, roads, and flows of people on screen as an education in seeing the city.^*1 Moving from a rural environment to a metropolis provided an early basis for understanding architecture as an environment that appears fragmentarily before a moving body, rather than as a completed object viewed from a fixed position. By the time she pursued research at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the 1990s, this experience had developed into a method of traveling through Beijing, Cairo, São Paulo, and other cities to photograph how modern architecture was used, extended, and absorbed into surrounding transport systems under different social, economic, and topographic circumstances.^*2

Konrad has identified portability, economy, materiality, and freedom of movement as reasons for choosing analog 35mm photography.^*3 A small camera lets her move between a vehicle, the street, and building interiors, attending to additions, signs, construction work, and peripheral equipment with the same care given to the façade of a celebrated building. Her process emphasizes returning with many negatives and rearranging them through copying, enlargement, and sequencing for each exhibition and publication, rather than deciding on a single conclusive view at the moment of exposure. The ability to collect images while moving and compare cities afterward gives the 35mm format its necessity within the work.

Urban Expansion since the 1990s and Architecture after Completion

Since the 1990s, high-rise housing, transport networks, redevelopment, and informal additions have advanced simultaneously in global cities. Konrad photographs dirt, renovation, vegetation, provisional structures, and surrounding roads alongside recently completed architecture. Even buildings shaped by similar design principles take on different forms of use in Beijing, Cairo, and São Paulo, according to local materials, migration, climate, and regulation. Her sustained movement among cities adds the time of extraction, construction, occupation, and alteration to a view that would otherwise fix a building as the architect’s completed work. ^{*4 *5}

An Archive Re-edited through Exhibition Space

Konrad’s archive functions as more than a repository searchable by place and date. It is a working resource whose internal relations are remade for each exhibition. Photographs from different cities, periods, and scales sit beside one another, so the meaning of an individual image changes through neighboring photographs, height, size, and the route through the gallery. The photobook Elasticity similarly takes the form of a visual essay that “installs” the personal archive inside a book according to its own rhythm.^*6 Rearrangement, more than classification, becomes a procedure for reading urban structure.

Konrad mounts images on windows, enlarges them across entire walls, carries them around corners, and brings moving images and printed matter into close proximity. She has explained that images dealing with architecture should respond to the material and formal dimensions of the exhibition site.^*3 A monumental photograph near an entrance, reflective glass, and a copy that dissolves into halftone dots at close range alter the viewer’s route in tangible ways. Exhibition space becomes a site of production that shapes both the meaning of the image and the body’s experience of seeing it.

Quarries and Modern Architecture within a Chain of Resources

In the quarry series, Konrad leaves the finished architectural form and turns toward the geology and labor from which stone is extracted. The Secession exhibition Autofictions in Stone connects stories of stone, mining, movement, and architecture through photography and spatial construction.^*7 When modern architecture is viewed as formal beauty, the origin of its material is easy to overlook. By linking urban façades and quarry cuts within the same archive, Konrad treats architecture as a process of cutting the ground, transporting matter, and stacking it into place, as well as a cultural sign.

How Reproduction and Enlargement Expose the Circulation of Architectural Images

Alongside prints made from negatives, Konrad uses photocopiers, silkscreen, coarse enlargement, and wallpaper-like printing. Successive reproductions lose tonal range and detail, turning architecture from an information-rich record into particles and contours that occupy a wall. In FOMU’s Umbau, the same image changes scale in response to columns, passageways, and monumental walls; up close it breaks into halftone dots, then resolves into a building again at a distance.^*8 The rough surface turns the cultural circulation of architecture through magazines, advertising, and design documents into a bodily experience of viewing distance in the gallery.

Japan Works: Comparing Use and Traces of Occupation across the Page

Japan Works brings together housing, schools, hotels, temples, high-rises, stations, bridges, classrooms, stairs, and furniture across color and black-and-white images, exteriors and interiors.^*9 Each spread links different uses, periods, and scales, giving celebrated architecture and everyday equipment the same rhythm on the page. Alongside styles associated with individual designers, the reader follows buildings as they are occupied, altered, and connected to transport and vegetation around them. As an IACK review observes, the binding and spread of the book operate like a small, portable exhibition wall.^*10 Editing unlike buildings and traces of use into proximity enables comparison without erasing differences of place, making the photobook a second site that gives the archive new adjacencies.

Umbau: Treating the Exhibition as a Renovation

FOMU’s Umbau looked back across the long-term archive without fixing the work in chronological order, rearranging the venue as though it were being renovated.^*8 The title, meaning “conversion” or “rebuilding,” joins photographs of altered cities and buildings to a form in which image size and position are reconstructed for each site. Large prints, sequences of small images, books, moving-image works, and reproductions enter the field of vision at different speeds. Viewers assemble comparisons as they walk instead of following a single explanation of one city.

In books, the time of turning pages, the connection across a spread, the quality of paper, and the repetition of images produce a different form of urban movement from the wall. A review in Glean examines the centrality of books, cities, archives, and spatial thinking to Konrad’s work.^*1 Just as an exhibition changes its arrangement from venue to venue, the book functions as a small architecture that redesigns the order of images.

Her early urban surveys relied heavily on black-and-white photography, while later work makes active use of color. A Glean/HART review of Umbau notes that color connects building materials, signs, vegetation, and provisional structures through a different rhythm, altering the familiar appearance of the archive.^*11 Older black-and-white negatives and newer color images appear side by side in exhibitions, foregrounding relations produced by present editing over a chronological account of the city.

Adding Multiple Positions of Observation to the Representative View of Architecture

Architectural photography often aligns horizontal and vertical lines and summarizes a building from the position that makes the design intention most legible. Konrad’s images include objects protruding from windows, later signs, parked cars, additions, and shadows from neighboring buildings, then jump in the next photograph to another point in the same city. A review of Iconocity in De Witte Raaf likewise argues that the urban situation and the method of display must be read together.^*12 Fragments gathered in motion and the order imposed afterward both become forms of urban knowledge, without converging on one representative image of a building.

Joining Urban Research and Exhibition Design in One Process

Movement through a site, archiving, reproduction, enlargement, photobook editing, and installation in the gallery form one production process. The “rebuilding” named by Umbau also describes the remaking of architectural images in relation to an exhibition space. FOMU placed this transformation of architectural and urban processes into photographic installation at the center of the exhibition.^*8

When photographing works by well-known architects, Konrad includes items taped to windows, additions, dirt, cars, and surrounding buildings, recording how occupation changes architecture after completion. An exhibition at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen paired Konrad with Armin Linke as artists concerned with the complexity of architecture and society.^*5 The building appears as the preservation of an author’s intention and as part of a city continually updated by many people and institutions.

Reading the Specific Differences of Cities through Comparison

Across many cities, similar forms of high-rise housing and roads begin to repeat. Konrad’s sequences also retain differences in terrain, material, additions, and use. Published in 2021, Japan Works mixes building types and interiors, presenting architecture in Japan through several uses and temporal layers.^*13 Comparison becomes a procedure for examining institutional and everyday differences that remain between superficially similar images, not a conclusion that fixes their common features.

The 2023 exhibition WHAT MAD PURSUIT brought Konrad together with Armin Linke and Bas Princen to reconsider photography as a medium that records and transforms reality while acquiring a physical presence on the walls and pathways of the exhibition.^*14*15 In Elasticity, the personal archive is reconstructed through book sequence and repeated exhibition; in Autofictions in Stone, photographs linking quarrying, stone, and architecture extend across the surfaces of the gallery.^*16*17*20

The jury statement for the Camera Austria Award valued the archive produced through urban research across the world as an apparatus for analyzing and historicizing cities, beyond its role as documentation. Seen alongside her sustained attention to metropolitan infrastructure and spontaneous additions since the early 1990s, Konrad’s photography accumulates the time through which cities are revised by society, rather than illustrating buildings as isolated objects.^*18*19