Paul Albert Leitner

Photographic Training and Photojournalism — Photography as a Medium of Contact with Reality

Leitner received professional training in photography from 1973 to 1976^*33. There he learned passport photography, developing, retouching, and other skills, acquiring photography first as a craft^*30. As a young man he read Life, Quick, and Stern and was strongly drawn to photographs of the Vietnam War and to Thomas Hoepker and Weegee. He became interested in photojournalism that pursued decisive moments by being in the right place at the right time^*30. This outward-facing photography and the art he later began by using himself as material initially pointed in different directions.

Why He Began with the Self — Imagining Another Life Beyond Heimat

Leitner’s early concern with the “self” grew from more than an abstract interest in interior life. It was bound to the urgent question of what kind of life he could make his own.Tyrol, where he grew up, is a federal state in western Austria extending through the Alps; Innsbruck is its capital, and Jenbach is one of its towns.For Leitner, who received vocational training in photography there, the medium first meant a craft that included passport portraits, developing, and retouching. At Café Central in Innsbruck, however, he encountered the atmosphere of art and urban life, and Die Presse reports that his first visits to Munich in the late 1970s drew him into an “entirely different life” of film, jazz, and museums^*30. Becoming a photographer was tied to choosing a life different from the one he had known, not simply to expressing an already formed self.

Gerald Matt later recalled Innsbruck of that period as a city strongly shaped by tourism-driven commercialization, from which artists and intellectuals were leaving. He described Leitner as someone who chose to leave instead of remaining in an “inner exile.” For Leitner, Matt writes, Jenbach became constricting early on, and a desire for “breadth” and “the other” propelled him toward travel^*31. The “Heimat” from which Leitner sought distance in this region did not mean the mountains or nature themselves. Writing about Austreibung der Heimat, Matt describes the work as a kind of “visual exorcism” that estranged ready-made images of home by combining them with found cross-shaped objects^*31Alpine scenery, regional identity, and traditional life were idealized as tourist attractions and repeated as images of what the region ought to be. Austreibung der Heimat grew out of resistance to being fixed within that already formed image of home.Leitner himself described the 1986 work as a spontaneous revolt against Tyrol’s “sanctified” environment; later he said that one can create multiple forms of “home” in books, art, and music as well^*28. In his account, the object of resistance was less the territory of Tyrol itself than an environment that treated Heimat as a fixed ideal.At this stage, the “self” was less a search for an inner essence than a question of how far he could move beyond an identity assigned by birthplace and regional values and construct another way of living.

His early collages, overpainting, mirrors, projections, and shadows gave visual form to that question. Marie Röbl describes them as a “search for self-knowledge”^*26. In Matt’s account, Austreibung der Heimat estranged conventional images of Heimat with cross-shaped found objects. Leitner later made another series in the living room of his Jenbach home, placing himself before projected images of journeys he had not yet taken. The self who was “here” and the self who wanted to be elsewhere occupied the same picture^*31. Mirrors, projections, and collage were not techniques for arriving at a single correct portrait. They allowed him to take apart the actual body, inherited images of home, and other lives imagined through art and travel, then bring those elements into collision within one frame.

In 1985 he published “Das Leben. Ein Spiel.” with photography historian Timm Starl in Vier Wege^*10. In 1988 he used Die imaginären Reisen des A.R. as the title of an exhibition^*8. The 1985 publication places “life” in its title, while the 1988 exhibition invokes “imaginary journeys.” The transition connecting early self-staging to later travel becomes explicit in the 1990s with Exkurs über das Reisen, where experience of the world and experience of the self are treated together^*26.

Seen across this trajectory, the question of why photography became necessary to Leitner’s travel practice also comes into focus. As a young man, he had been drawn to photojournalism and to the idea of placing oneself at the right place and time to pursue a decisive moment; he learned photography as a craft directed outward toward the world^*30. Travel allowed him to do more than imagine an elsewhere through projection and collage: a photograph could preserve an encounter that had occurred once, in an actual place. In his hotel self-portraits, he also recorded his own state at that moment as a “record of my existence,” while the Legende attached place and time to the image^*28*3. Photography could therefore place not only an image of the world but also the photographer who had been there within the same exposure and temporal sequence. That capacity binds travel, self-image, and archive into a single practice.

Austria in the 1980s — “Author Photography” and the Formation of Photographic Institutions

During the 1980s, as Leitner developed his staged self-images, institutions in Austria were also beginning to treat photography as an independent art form. FOTOHOF was founded in 1981^*13. Public collecting of photography also began that year^*17. Camera Austria had been publishing sustained criticism of photography since 1980^*27. In 1985, Neue Fotografie aus Wien presented diaries, serial portraiture, narrative sequences, and other distinct approaches to “reality” under the rubric of “author photography”^*25. The photographer’s position and way of seeing were moving to the foreground as artistic questions, displacing any assumption that the photograph was a neutral record.

In 1986, Leitner was selected as one of the first three recipients of a federal scholarship for photographic artists^*14. The following year, Camera Austria titled a feature including Leitner “Self-Images / World-Images.” The magazine argued that new photography demanded an exact description of the position each photographer takes in each work, and emphasized a skeptical engagement with reality and a “conscious acknowledgment of subjective experience” alongside any preplanned concept^*29. In Camera Austria’s 1987 feature, the “self” did not mean private confession alone. It meant taking responsibility for the position from which an image of the world is produced. Leitner’s effort to detach himself from Heimat met a contemporary photographic concern with keeping the photographer’s position visible.

In later historical research, staging remained a major lens through which this period was read. In a study of Austrian art of the 1980s, Timm Starl titled the photography chapter “Der Stand der Dinge. Österreich,” focusing on scenes and staging in art photography of the decade^*11. Leitner’s mirrors, projections, and collages belong to this moment, when the idea of photography as a transparent window onto reality was under pressure and photographers were asking how an image is constructed and how their own position enters it.

Travel and Straight Photography — From an Imagined Outside to Encounters with Others

In 1984, Leitner left Tyrol and moved to Vienna^*33. Around this period, other places could still be imagined through projections and collage. Actual travel, however, brought him into situations in which people, light, signs, and hotels did not arrange themselves according to his plan. Marie Röbl reads the transitional Exkurs über das Reisen as a journey in which “experience of the world and experience of the self” intersect^*26. The “outside” through which he tested the self shifted from images constructed in the studio to places in reality that he could not control.

With this shift, the work moved from synthesizing images in the studio toward straight photography that admitted the unpredictability of what happened on site. Leitner has said that composition grows from both staging and chance, and that photographing involves long periods of waiting as well as moments of immediate response; at the same time, he has explained that an image can already exist in the imagination before the shutter is released^*28. He did not abandon staging altogether. The image formed in advance was now allowed to change through contact with actual people, objects, light, and chance.

The form addressed a world and a self understood as changing rather than fixed. When discussing Romania and Cuba, Leitner spoke of the spread of globalization—including Western commodities, pop music, and Coca-Cola—through societies that were themselves in transition^*9. Placing himself in changing environments also unsettled the photographer’s own judgments and values. Kunsthalle Wien’s 2007 description of his work as a “photographic travel diary” situated it within the tradition of the Bildungsroman: a young man undertakes a “journey toward himself” while recording the changes that happen to him over the course of life’s journey^*2. The early staged question of whether another self was possible became, in the straight photographs, a temporal inquiry into how his way of seeing changed after passing through different worlds.

The Flâneur and the Pace of Walking — Creating Distance from an Accelerating Society

Camera Austria describes Leitner as a “flâneur.” The term refers to an urban wanderer who does not move directly toward a destination, but walks while attending to people, words, architecture, and the city’s margins.In 2007, Leitner called speed an illusion and “turbo-capitalism” absurd, arguing that observation requires time. His motifs emerge through walking, waiting, and chance, and he aligns his method with the flâneur’s preference for an “odyssey of chance” over the shortest route^*28. He walked through industrial zones, housing estates, and garbage dumps to see how industry, poverty, development, and consumer culture appeared outside landmark districts^*9. His analog habit of thinking repeatedly before pressing the shutter, partly to conserve film, belonged to the same slow form of observation^*30.

His way of walking through cities was also discussed outside specialist photography discourse as a form of urban representation. In 2012–13, Leitner took part in GrazMuseum’s Eyes on the City. Urbane Räume in der Gegenwartsfotografie^*33. Brigitte Kovacs reviewed the exhibition in the urbanism and architecture journal dérive^*12. The exhibition catalogue also included Hubertus von Amelunxen’s essay on Leitner, “Paul Albert Leitner – oder wie einer umherging, um Momente des Lebens aufzulesen”^*10. Its title links walking and collecting, succinctly describing Leitner’s movement through the city as a way of seeing.

Why He Keeps Photographing Himself While Traveling — Using the Self as a Fixed Point for Change

The recurring hotel self-portraits carry the early investigation of the self into the structure of travel. Leitner takes the same eggshell-colored “photographic suit” with him and has explained that he always makes a hotel self-portrait to capture his state at that moment and create a “record of my existence.” He has also said that the central concern is less the location itself than “art and life,” and that he appears from place to place like a character in a novel^*28. In the early work, mirrors and projections transformed the self-image itself. In the travel self-portraits, he keeps clothing and pose relatively constant, allowing differences of year, place, body, and surrounding culture to register against a stable outward form.

The choice of hotels also extends his long concern with Heimat. Leitner does not tie home to a single birthplace; he has said that one can create “multiple homes” in books, art, and music, and that he sometimes feels more at home abroad^*28. A hotel is not a settled home but a temporary place occupied for a short time. In Me, myself in a Hotel, the repeated figure does not declare any one place to be his true home. The series records a self that is never fully fixed, together with a succession of provisional places in different cities. FOTOHOF likewise describes the hotel as a typical space of transit in which Leitner stages himself as consciously remaining in the “here and now”^*3.

The self-portraits therefore do more than prove that the photographer was present. The person collecting images around the world is repeatedly recorded within the same unfolding time. Kunsthalle Wien described his travel diary as a record of changes that happen to him over the course of life, and presented self-portraits, other people, and nature in a continuous exhibition sequence^*2. EMOP Berlin’s 2018 exhibition likewise noted that Leitner had been photographing himself in analog form for more than thirty years, with staging, pose, and a dedicated “photographic suit” as important elements of the self-portraits^*32. The question carried forward from the early work is how the self is continually remade through contact with place, time, and other people.

Legende, Place, and Time — Keeping the Point of Exposure Fixed as Meaning Changes

Here, Legende does not mean “legend”; it is closer to a caption or record attached to a photograph. Leitner mounts small prints on cards and adds a number, exact place, and time. FOTOHOF treats image and text as a unit, explaining that the place name, room number, and date and time in the hotel self-portraits fix a temporary “here and now”^*3. At the same time, Leitner observed the spread of Western products and ways of life across different regions, including former socialist countries, as cities increasingly came to resemble one another^*9. Even when urban landscapes begin to look alike, the Legende restores a specific place and time to each image. A photograph can later move into another thematic group while retaining its original point of exposure. Meaning can be reorganized within the archive without erasing the coordinates of the photograph’s making.

In a Tyrol state art-acquisition publication, Günther Moschig cites Leitner’s description of a photographer’s realism as “philosophical, linguistic, and geographical”^*19. The same text does not present him as a straightforward documentary photographer. These three registers take concrete form in the Legende: geographically, it fixes the point and time of exposure; linguistically, it joins titles and supplementary information to the image; philosophically, it keeps visible who saw the world and from where. Leitner’s realism lies in preserving the coordinates under which an image came into being as concretely as possible, while leaving the photographer’s subjectivity in view.

Newspapers, Advertisements, and Clippings — Linking the World Seen Directly with the World as Reported

Leitner also collects newspaper articles, advertisements, and found objects. FOTOHOF notes that he calls reading the newspaper a “system of detours” and uses clippings in a form of self-examination conducted through images and words^*3. Not taking the shortest route through a city and drifting from one newspaper topic to another are versions of the same method. The work remains open to associations arriving from outside instead of collecting only what fits a predetermined theme.In Camera Austria’s Die Wellen kommen, waves at sea are paired with headlines invoking “waves of infection,” “waves of bankruptcies,” and similar phrases^*1.

An Archive of More Than 80,000 Images — Working with an Excess That Resists Final Order

In an archive of more than 80,000 images, one photograph may belong to several categories—“Street Life,” “Signs,” “Hotel Rooms,” “Self-Portrait,” and others—so classifications overlap. Camera Austria distinguishes this from the Bechers’ typologies built for systematic comparison^*1. Leitner himself has said that while he is adding to the world of images, he also confronts an “excess of images”^*9. In another interview, he acknowledged that typological organization becomes more difficult as motifs accumulate^*28. The archive is not a completed map of the world. It is a place where events found while walking, self-portraits, and fragments of newspapers and advertising can be reorganized years later from a different point of interest while the coordinates of exposure remain intact. Its operation reflects an understanding that, because both world and self change, neither classification nor photographic meaning reaches a final state.

In 1995, Monika Faber contributed an essay titled “Der Archivar endet im Wahnsinn” (“The Archivist Ends in Madness”) to Bilder Nr. 111, on Leitner and Robert Jelinek, showing that collecting and classification were already objects of critical attention by the mid-1990s^*10. Even in the later archive of more than 80,000 images, a single photograph can enter multiple groups, and classification does not close into a fixed system^*1.

Exkurs über das Reisen, 1991/92 — From Staged Photography to Travel as Sequence

Exkurs über das Reisen brings about forty travel photographs into a dense sequence with diary-like texts, following a structure of digressions that resembles a road movie^*26. Röbl reads Exkurs in the title as an unpredictable detour and describes travel as a site where experience of the world and experience of the self unfold together. Staging did not disappear; the scenario opened out from a single set-piece into fragments encountered while moving.

Camera Austria 53 (1995) presented Wien: Momente einer Stadt as a continuation of Exkurs über das Reisen, this time introducing Leitner as a flâneur walking through Vienna’s public spaces^*7. Applying the same method to the city where he lived, not only to foreign destinations, shows that the central subject was not distance itself but how a walking photographer discovers changes in society, the city, and the self.

Kunst und Leben. Ein Roman, 1999 — Why Call It a “Novel”?

Kunst und Leben. Ein Roman is a photobook that arranges 249 images into twenty thematic groups^*4. For Leitner, the world was a place where actual and invented images intersected, with the “I” positioned between them^*1. Calling it a “novel” refers not to a fictional plot, but to a structure in which changing the connections among photographs also changes the way a life and a world can be read.

In a Fotomuseum Winterthur collection text, Rainer Iglar describes Leitner’s small prints mounted on cards, serial numbering, and handwritten place and date. He adds that individual photographs can carry poetic intensity, while in series or books they develop into a personal autobiography or a broader historical narrative^*20. Following Iglar’s observation, the photobook brings together cities, self-portraits, objects, and words that were unrelated at the moment of exposure, allowing personal autobiography and broader historical time to appear within the same sequence.

Städte, Episoden, 2005 — Placing the City and Autobiography on the Same Map

Städte, Episoden contains 455 photographs made between 1979 and 2004, interweaving stations, airports, cemeteries, text, and self-portraits^*5. By placing spaces of transit such as stations and hotels alongside self-portraits made at the end of journeys, the book turns the photographer’s own passage through time, as well as changes in the city, into an “episode.”

0–24, 2008 — Reading the Language of the City through Signs and Advertising

0–24 is a photobook of signs and advertisements from Europe, former socialist countries, the Hispanic world, New York, and the American South; FOTOHOF connects it to the work of Eugène Atget^*6. Leitner described the spread of Western consumer culture into Romania and Cuba as part of globalization^*9. Leitner’s own description of responding with an analog camera to an environment saturated with advertising and signs around the clock also suggests^*6 that the signs are more than a formal collection: they register how politically different places come to resemble one another through a shared commercial language.

Contemporary Staged Photography — Differences from Peter Dressler, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Nan Goldin

Röbl compares Leitner with Peter Dressler. Dressler physically intervenes in hotels and interiors he encounters by chance, altering the scene itself; in Leitner’s later work, poses and props are added while the basic contours of the found situation remain intact^*26. Leitner has acknowledged the influence of Nobuyoshi Araki and appeared in group exhibitions with Nan Goldin, Heinz Cibulka, and VALIE EXPORT^*9. As Röbl’s discussion of contemporary Austrian photography through staging, the body, and narrative suggests, self-staging was one important axis for thinking about photography at the time^*26. Leitner connected that concern to chance encounters while traveling and to the long-term archive.

Eggleston, Shore, Friedlander, and the Bechers — Similar Methods, Different Questions

Camera Austria places Leitner in relation to American New Color, Friedlander, Ruscha, and others^*1. He has also spoken of his affinity with Eggleston’s attention to “insignificant things”^*9. Within the New Color lineage referenced by Camera Austria, everyday color and ordinary built environments themselves became subjects of art photography^*1. In Leitner’s work, recurring corporate logos and synthetic colors cross national borders, turning everyday color into material for comparing the homogenization of the world^*9.

Shore likewise photographed roads, parking lots, housing developments, and other ordinary landscapes on road trips^*22. Leitner extends that kind of looking across decades and multiple continents, using the Legende and self-portraiture to preserve when, where, and by whom a scene was seen. The ordinary landscapes of travel do not become anonymous.

Friedlander inserted the photographer into mirrors and reflections^*23. The Bechers standardized conditions in order to compare industrial structures^*24. The comparison clarifies Leitner’s position. He does not remove the observer from the image; by repeating self-portraits in the same clothing and related poses over decades, he makes the observer’s body and passage through time part of the record. At the same time, unlike a typological system that fixes conditions for comparison, his archive can place one photograph in several categories and leave it available for later regrouping^*1. The act of classifying the world is therefore never separated from changes in the self doing the seeing. He has also spoken of his affinity with Joel Meyerowitz’s sense of the “weight of shadows”^*28. He brought existing methods—everyday color, travel, self-imaging, and classification—into a single long-term archive that tracks changes in both the world and himself.

The Risks of the Traveling Gaze — Reading the Work as a Subjective World-Image

In a FOTOTAPETA interview, Leitner is directly asked about the position of the “First World tourist” from which he photographs different places. He replies that he remains a foreigner and that this position is inherently ambivalent^*9. FOTOHOF, however, describes him as a photographer who enters side streets and everyday settings and researches local literature and history, rather than seeking the exoticism of travel^*3. Because precise records of place and time coexist with editing driven by the photographer’s own associations, the question of the position from which he views the societies he visits remains inseparable from the work.

Recent Reassessment — Reading the Archive as a Method of Slow Time

In recent years, the archive itself has become a focus of reassessment. In 2023, FOTOHOF foregrounded what it called the work’s “archival” dimension^*3. Camera Austria likewise placed “obsession” at the center of its 2025 exhibition^*1. In 2026, the Austrian Ministry of Culture cited his use of the camera as an instrument of world experience and self-knowledge, and the way his meticulously organized body of work resists the accelerated temporality of the present, in its rationale for the State Prize^*15. The slowness of walking, the one-time character of each exposure, and later reclassification are now being read together as a way of working with time. The 2025 Camera Austria exhibition surveying more than four decades of work and the 2026 State Prize form a continuous institutional sequence in which the accumulated body of photographs is valued not simply for its scale, but as a method for repeatedly reorganizing world experience and self-knowledge^*1*15.

In 2020, the independent Viennese photography magazine Auslöser devoted a long-form interview in its third issue to Leitner. In response to a world in which everything is moving online and accelerating, the magazine states an editorial aim of “slowing photography down” through extended interviews in print^*21. That editorial position is indicative of the environment in which Leitner’s long commitment to walking, analog photography, classification, and rereading can be received, after digitization, as a different temporal mode.

The 2010 Art Prize and the 2026 State Prize — Two Distinct Honors

Viewed institutionally, this long reception history includes two similarly named honors in 2010 and 2026, but they are distinct awards. In its photography category, the 2010 Österreichischer Kunstpreis recognized an extensive and internationally acknowledged body of work; Leitner was the recipient^*18. The ministry’s current list of laureates likewise records photography as a category dating to 1988 and names Leitner as the 2010 recipient^*16. The Österreichischer Staatspreis für künstlerische Fotografie, announced on August 7, 2026, is a separate lifetime-achievement award that the ministry describes as the highest honor the Republic can bestow for artistic photography. Leitner was unanimously selected as its eleventh recipient, with the award ceremony scheduled for fall 2026^*15. He did not receive the same award twice; two separate programs recognized his work at different moments.