VIENNA

A magical visual photographic night-time wandering through the city of Vienna by the Austrian photograher and artist Kitty Kino using her mobile phone as the camera..

Kitty Kino

25 × 35,5 cm
176 pages
112 images
English, German
Hardcover
ISBN 978-3-901753-77-0
October 2014

Limited, numbered and signed edition of 1,000 copies.

40.00
incl. 10% vat, excl. shipping
Free shipping to Austria and Germany

SKU: 978-3-901753-77-0 Categories: , Tags: ,

Authors

  • Kitty Kino

    Kitty Kino was born in Vienna, is a graduate of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, where she [...] more

Awards

  • Deutscher Fotobuchpreis NOMINIERT
  • Px3 Award - Prix de la Photographie

Details

Kitty Kino is a film director and photographer from Vienna. KITTY KINO goes on a journey of discovery to places where everything seems already familiar. KITTY KINO portrays her Vienna on night-time wanderings. KITTY KINO’s distinctive qualities, her colour and image composition that borders on the abstract, together with her playfully applied ‘pixilism’, using a Nokia 6131 mobile, bring out features somewhere ­between photography and painting. Photographic brush strokes. Plus lucis VIENNA.

A mobile with integrated camera – what a disappointment! Under best sunny conditions: the pictures flat, rough and dull, but what else could I expect at this low resolution? That was in 2007.

One night on the way home, on a whim, I tried again. What a surprise! The street lights: pulled out into lightning and stars; the colours: lurid and eerily untrue; the buildings: atomized into dots, almost transparent, practically dancing. In contrast: the blackness of the sky – impermeable deepest black. But sometimes, when the eye has long registered night, the sky in these photographs still radiates a wonderful blue. This blue also comes in a unique texture that differs fundamentally from the irritating noise of other night-time pictures.

I call the aesthetic of this photographic technique PIXILISM and the photo cycle KUNST.STADT.NACHT. Again and again I surprise myself with the results of my night-time pickings. Filters or other post-editing do not come into it, except to adjust brightness and as minor retouching. Usually I even leave the picture detail unchanged – possibly something I picked up when making films. It seems, moreover, that the photographs taken with this tiny mobile phone camera are utterly indifferent to the dimensions of the print: black stays black, pixel stays pixel, colour stays colour. There is no fuzziness due to size.

The device has its drawbacks, of course. The memory is full after only 30 pictures and the battery empty at the same time. It is almost like analogue photography, you have to be very careful with your resources.

By now I cherish the preciously obsolete Nokia 6131, because only with this device can I transform the icons of the city into light and colour mirages within a black frame of night. Only with this device am I able to introduce movement into the firm substance of buildings, monuments or sculptures and to atomize them into almost abstract phenomena. In doing so I am attracted by questions like whether it is possible to find a new view of landmarks that have been photographed thousands of times, or whether I’ll succeed in capturing the paradox of finding what I consider typical in what is unique. Artistic pictures, the great film director Andrej Tarkowskij wrote, should not trigger associations but memories of truth.

Description

Kitty Kino is a film director and photographer from Vienna. KITTY KINO goes on a journey of discovery to places where everything seems already familiar. KITTY KINO portrays her Vienna on night-time wanderings. KITTY KINO’s distinctive qualities, her colour and image composition that borders on the abstract, together with her playfully applied ‘pixilism’, using a Nokia 6131 mobile, bring out features somewhere ­between photography and painting. Photographic brush strokes. Plus lucis VIENNA.

A mobile with integrated camera – what a disappointment! Under best sunny conditions: the pictures flat, rough and dull, but what else could I expect at this low resolution? That was in 2007.

One night on the way home, on a whim, I tried again. What a surprise! The street lights: pulled out into lightning and stars; the colours: lurid and eerily untrue; the buildings: atomized into dots, almost transparent, practically dancing. In contrast: the blackness of the sky – impermeable deepest black. But sometimes, when the eye has long registered night, the sky in these photographs still radiates a wonderful blue. This blue also comes in a unique texture that differs fundamentally from the irritating noise of other night-time pictures.

I call the aesthetic of this photographic technique PIXILISM and the photo cycle KUNST.STADT.NACHT. Again and again I surprise myself with the results of my night-time pickings. Filters or other post-editing do not come into it, except to adjust brightness and as minor retouching. Usually I even leave the picture detail unchanged – possibly something I picked up when making films. It seems, moreover, that the photographs taken with this tiny mobile phone camera are utterly indifferent to the dimensions of the print: black stays black, pixel stays pixel, colour stays colour. There is no fuzziness due to size.

The device has its drawbacks, of course. The memory is full after only 30 pictures and the battery empty at the same time. It is almost like analogue photography, you have to be very careful with your resources.

By now I cherish the preciously obsolete Nokia 6131, because only with this device can I transform the icons of the city into light and colour mirages within a black frame of night. Only with this device am I able to introduce movement into the firm substance of buildings, monuments or sculptures and to atomize them into almost abstract phenomena. In doing so I am attracted by questions like whether it is possible to find a new view of landmarks that have been photographed thousands of times, or whether I’ll succeed in capturing the paradox of finding what I consider typical in what is unique. Artistic pictures, the great film director Andrej Tarkowskij wrote, should not trigger associations but memories of truth.

Additional information

Weight2.5 kg / 5.51 lbs
Book Author