Camera Austria International 107 | 2009

The contributions in this issue of Camera Austria No. 107 each take a different approach in exploring the significance of the photographic/ filmic document and the relevance of the concept of realism for artistic work today. Based on three years of research on the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgian Tervuren, that opened in 1907, Peggy Buth developed the two-volume artist’s book “Desire in Representation” in 2008. The material that Buth compiled for the spread of images in this issue comprises her own photographic documentation of the museum, archive images and documents, excerpts from travel reports and adventure novels, that the artist weaves together to create a picture of colonial representation. In photographic sequences, an illustrated text collage, and an extensive index, on different narrative layers she traces structures of desire in which the colonisers’ projections of the “other” become entangled, as Beatrice von Bismarck explains in her accompanying essay.