G.R.A.M.

Graz, 1987 — A Collective Across Photography, Video, and Performance

G.R.A.M. was founded in Graz in 1987 by Günther Holler-Schuster, Ronald Walter, Armin Ranner, and Martin Behr, and later continued as the duo of Holler-Schuster and Behr. In Graz, Camera Austria had operated since the 1970s as an artist-run photographic project, building an international network in which photography was discussed across art, theory, and publishing^*23. This shared urban environment helps situate G.R.A.M.’s cross-media work within a culture that considered photography through magazines, video, media, and theory as well as through individual art objects.

This cross-media orientation places photography in continuity with newspapers, video, and performance. esc medien kunst labor describes G.R.A.M. as a collective working with highly familiar images and signs drawn from everyday life, advertising, news, and commodity culture, with an interest in the politics of visibility^*14. Their starting point is the way images already circulating in society enter public memory.

The 1990s Media Environment — Visual Formulas Before Events

When G.R.A.M. began working, television, tabloids, advertising, and press photography repeatedly circulated politicians, celebrities, wars, and economic crises through similar compositions and gestures. An Austrian Federal Ministry art-prize text locates the collective’s sustained interest in clichéd, memorable visual worlds generated by everyday life, media, and commodity aesthetics^*7. Photography matters because many of their source images have already entered society as photographs and become forms through which events are remembered.

Photography Now’s biography and exhibition records show a sustained engagement with stereotypical media images from Paparazzi through Global Player and Hohes Haus^*9. The subjects shift from celebrity culture to politics and finance, while each project exploits the instant familiarity through which an image seems immediately legible.

Paparazzi — Putting Anonymous People into the Form of a “Scoop”

Paparazzi began during a 1997 MAK residency in Los Angeles as a project transferring the visual habits and image stereotypes of commercial paparazzi photography into art^*25. Long lenses, obstructions, cars, entrances, and hurried figures transform ordinary neighborhood scenes into images that invite viewers to imagine secrecy or scandal. As the source describes a movement from “fact” to “fiction,” the photographic form that makes a viewer believe a celebrity has been spotted becomes the subject.

According to the Salon für Kunstbuch publication information, the concept for Paparazzi began roughly a year before the deaths of Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed, and the photographs developed from the collective’s 1997 stay in Los Angeles^*25. Even before that event, G.R.A.M. was examining how voyeuristic distance, rough image quality, and partially hidden subjects could turn everyday life into “news.”

Christine König Galerie’s café paparazzi records that the project began before Princess Diana’s fatal accident and developed through the Los Angeles residency into a reenactment of commercial photographic hunting within an art setting^*6. The project reenacts individual images and the broader grammar through which paparazzi photography is recognized.

Reenactments — Small Deviations Reveal the Gesture of the Original

Photon’s REENACTMEDIA presents Reenactments as an ongoing body of work that performs, quotes, and samples existing well-known images^*4. From early Laurel and Hardy images to political and press photographs, the group preserves poses and compositions while rebuilding them with actors’ bodies and ordinary props, producing small deviations in every copy.

Camera Austria’s Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ne, Ne, Ne, Ne emphasizes the deviations that remain in these reconstructions and the differences from their originals^*2. Visible imperfections draw attention to gesture, lighting, and composition as constructed features of the source image.

What Reenactment Reveals — Gestures Embedded in Photographs

A text in Camera Austria International 119 discusses G.R.A.M.’s method as a “redo” of poses and gestures preserved in photographs^*3. Returning the photograph to the body reveals gestures such as clutching the head, shaking hands, running, or avoiding a gaze as both event-specific moments and repeatable visual codes. Photographing the reenactment again places source and remake on the same visual plane, making photography both the object of critique and the device for comparison.

The City of Graz Kulturserver likewise describes G.R.A.M. as deliberately selecting fragments from a vast store of media imagery and working with gestures and formulas of heroism, tragedy, and victory related to the “politics of visibility”^*12. Repeating photographic compositions with bodies makes it possible to see images remembered as “history itself” as forms shaped by performance, editorial selection, printing, and repetition.

NixCheckCashing — Reading Financial Crisis Through the “Face of Crisis”

NixCheckCashing reenacts in the studio the expressions of shock, despair, and tension repeatedly used in newspaper photographs of traders during financial crises. Camera Austria explains that removing the specific stock-exchange setting and exposing the gestures of face and hands reveals how economic crisis was reported through a recognizable “face of crisis”^*1. The complexity of numbers and institutions is compressed into the image of a man holding his head.

The series shifts attention from the economic information carried by the source photographs to the visual language that translates information into a “face of crisis.” The gestures used by news photography to render abstract financial systems as human emotion become the subject. Camera Austria places the work among reenactment, appropriation, reinterpretation, and critical exposure because the copy borrows the authority of the source image while revealing how that authority is made^*1.

Hohes Haus — Extracting Political Gestures from Parliamentary Photography

Hohes Haus reconstructs confrontation, handshakes, gestures, and group arrangements familiar from photographs of parliaments and politicians. Christine König Galerie’s exhibition page includes large photographs and newspaper-format works referencing Seoul, Kyiv, Bern, Berlin, and other cities, showing how political stages are organized into similar visual forms across national events^*5.

An Artmagazine review connects the series to the disappearance or standardization of “grand gestures” within political space^*11 The inclusion of Hohes Haus (Seoul) in the Austrian Cultural Forum New York exhibition An I for an Eye places the work within an international discussion of contemporary photographic imagery^*10.

Photography, Newspapers, Video, and Performance — Extending Reenactment Across Media

G.R.A.M. extends reenactment into photographic prints, newspapers, video, and performance. Hohes Haus includes newspaper printing, while Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ne, Ne, Ne, Ne includes performances with actors and video, testing what happens when the same image codes move across media. FOTOHOF’s C-print edition of Paparazzi shows the series circulating as individual prints as well as in book form and describes how paparazzi conventions can make ordinary daily scenes look like “events”^*15.

G.R.A.M.: Reenactments 1998–2011, distributed by University of Toronto Press, gathers more than a decade of reenactments into one publication^*13 In FOTOHOF’s Der Coup der tadellosen Männer, gestures of politicians, soldiers, security personnel, soccer players, and others are organized through their shared “performative character,” turning the standardization of bodies in news photography into a book sequence^*18.

After Côte noire — Opening Political Images to Multiple Readings

Villa Arson’s presentation of Côte noire describes G.R.A.M. as a collective long concerned with the aesthetic and semantic construction of mass media^*8. The focus falls on visual codes that recur across different political positions and news stories.

In a Tiroler Tageszeitung interview, Martin Behr explains that one installation was intended to resist being read as a one-directional political statement^*16. The statement directs attention toward the visual forms through which political messages become legible. G.R.A.M. works with familiar image structures that enter the conditions of political judgment and help steer it.

Appropriation and Reenactment — Putting the Body Inside the Copy

G.R.A.M. connects to appropriation through its use of existing images, while its distinctive procedure sends the quoted image through the body before photographing it again. Camera Austria describes the work as a reconstruction of “image politics” that determine memory and history because^*1 the reenactment addresses the gestures through which photographs preserve human bodies as well as the quotation and circulation of the source image. Into post-conceptual analyses of existing images, G.R.A.M. inserts actors’ bodies, imperfect imitation, and the time required to photograph again. An earlier Austrian history of art includes Vienna Actionism, which placed body and action at the center of work in the 1960s^*24 G.R.A.M. repeats gestures preserved in photographs with present-day bodies, examining the point at which an action survives in memory as a public image^*3.

Camera Austria’s biography connects this work to a “politics of visibility” and describes its engagement with a repertoire of images—heroism, tragedy, notoriety, victory—that can move large publics^*17. Repeated photographic formulas enter the assumptions through which something comes to feel heroic, tragic, or catastrophic.

From Paparazzi to Financial Crisis — Rephotographing News-Image Formulas

G.R.A.M. begins with secondary images that have already circulated and entered memory. As Photon’s REENACTMEDIA identifies Paparazzi and Reenactments as key works, the media environment of the 1990s and after becomes the material of their photography^*4.

The method turns attention from deciding whether a photograph is true toward the visual habits that make a form look truthful. In FOTOHOF’s Paparazzi, anonymous people enter the formula of celebrity photography; in NixCheckCashing, studio reenactments enter the formula of financial-crisis reporting. G.R.A.M. slightly disturbs image types already stored in memory. Those deviations make visible how press, political, and celebrity photographs communicate reality while also shaping the way it is read.

Photography and Media Critique in Graz

Since the 1970s, Camera Austria has combined exhibitions with magazines, theory, and dialogue with artists, connecting Austrian photography to international discussion^*23. Together with institutions such as Neue Galerie Graz and Kunsthaus Graz, this history helps situate G.R.A.M. as a collective approaching photography from a broader field of media. Photography is one form of final work and also an analytical unit through which public images from newspapers and television can be stopped, reenacted with bodies, and returned to another setting.

G.R.A.M. participated in Neue Galerie Graz’s POSTMEDIA CONDITION, where the work was shown amid overlaps among photography, video, and digital images^*19.

Kunsthaus Graz records also show G.R.A.M. participating in contemporary art programs in the city within the context of steirischer herbst^*20.

mumok’s Photo/Politics/Austria treats press photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, and film stills in Austria as “images in the mind” that shape historical understanding, providing an institutional background for reading G.R.A.M.’s reenactments^*21.

The 1996 Austrian Triennial on Photography, RADICAL IMAGES, centered on how photography constructs and can critique social reality. It shows that photographic reality and the media environment were being publicly debated in Graz immediately before G.R.A.M. developed Paparazzi^*22.