Spring | Fotoeins Fotografie

Posts from the ‘Spring’ category

Vienna Central Cemetery: living city of the dead

Above/featured: The cemetery’s gate 2. Photo, 20 May 2018.

Where: Vienna Central Cemetery (Wiener Zentralfriedhof).
Who: Beethoven, Boltzmann, Falco, Lamarr, Schütte-Lihotzky, Strauss I and II, and many more.
Why: Cross-section of cultural and economic history for capital city and nation.

In Vienna, tram 71 begins in the Old Town; goes around the western half of the inner ring past City Hall, national Parliament, and the Opera House; and heads southeast to the city’s main cemetery or the Zentralfriedhof. Because coffins to the cemetery were once transported on the tram, there’s a saying particular to the city’s residents, a phrase which means they’ve died by “going to the end of the line.”

“Sie haben den 71er genommen.”
(They took/rode the 71.)

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Vienna: Holocaust Memorial by Rachel Whiteread

Where: Judenplatz, in Vienna’s Altstadt.
What: Holocaust Memorial, by Rachel Whiteread (2000).

How do you commemorate or memorialize the absent or missing? How should the void be acknowledged, recognized, and remembered? Does the act of constructing a physical monument “draw a line”, creating a physical manifestation of marking an end that gathers and wipes away all subsequent future responsibility for remembering?

In Vienna’s Old Town, what was unjustly and violently removed from the city’s long historical memory and cultural identity comes into shape at Judenplatz. Under the public square are ruins of the medieval synagogue destroyed in the pogrom of 1421 with hundreds of Jews driven out, hundreds killed by burning, and the community erased. Directly above these ruins is the Holocaust Memorial which attempts to generate experiences and memories to address the void left behind after the systematic murder of 65-thousand people.

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Einöden, Gasthof Hauserwirt, Wörgl, Tyrol, Tirol, Kufstein, Austria, Österreich, fotoeins.com

Small towns in the Austrian countryside

Above/featured: Bovine goodness with Gasthof Hauserwirt in the background, in Einöden at the outskirts of Wörgl – 13 May 2018.

Österreichische Dörfer auf dem Land

Spending a few weeks exploring Austria in spring between peak winter and summer seasons got me to examine a variety of artistic and cultural aspects, including:

• a search for Erwin Schrödinger’s grave,
• a century of Vienna Modernism,
• a day-trip from Vienna to Bratislava with a boat on the Danube, and
• looking for modern Salzburg beyond Mozart and The Sound of Music,

Because I’m all about trains and buses in Europe, there were many towns encountered: some passed by, and others planned and visited. The following examples of small towns in Austria includes a generous portion of mountains from the Austrian Alps.

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Salzburg Walk of Modern Art (2018)

Above: “Sphaera” by Stephan Balkenhol: Salzburg Kapitelplatz – 22 May 2018.

Salzburg is a well-known historical city in north-central Austria next to the border with Germany. For a different way of examining the city that goes beyond the history of the Habsburgs and the music of Mozart, the Walk of Modern Art allows visitors and residents to walk through parts of the city for a mix of historical and contemporary perspectives at street-level and from the cliffs above. The art pieces are placed throughout the city’s Old Town to coincide with key landmarks and sights. The city of Salzburg also provides information about the walk. UNESCO inscribed Salzburg’s Old Town as World Heritage Site in 1996.

Thankfully, there’s more to Salzburg than “The Sound of Music” (♫).

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Fuji X70, Fujifilm X70, Fujifilm, X70, Peak Design

My Fuji X70: from Austria to the US Southwest

Instead of merely complaining about a desire to carry something lighter for day-to-day photography situations, I decided to do something about it a couple of weeks before my month-long visit to Austria in May 2018.

I looked online for a mirrorless compact camera, but I didn’t need the latest or a top-line model. I preferred an older model with a lot of online reviews and user comments, and I decided on a compromise among three criteria: cost, weight and size, and image quality.

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