Mensch Feldkirch – Excerpt from book project
Marc Lins, Monika Schnitzbauer & Sigi Ramoser, Sägenvier Design Kommunikation
100 Portraits of a typical small town
The American author Susan Sontag writes in her essay collection ‘On Photography’: People who look good in a photo consider themselves attractive. Photography is thus not merely a copy of the world but gives it meaning.
Mensch Feldkirch is a Meaning Machine. When, for example, Tschik Olga (as her customers affectionately call her) moves from her small kiosk into the world of portraits, she forces us to see her in a different light. Her tobacco shop becomes a time travel in images, away from the hustle of quick exchanges of cigarettes for money. Olga then represents a Feldkirch that will soon no longer exist: the world of small people in small shops in a small town. No glamour. No kitsch. No longing. It is what it is. One could surely drop in, put on Carlos Santana’s Soul Sacrifice, light up a Havana or a Krummer Hund, and chat with her. She wouldn’t be surprised, she has seen a lot. Tschik Olga.
Marc Lins has photographed people in Feldkirch.
Across all social biotopes. Small and big people. Powerful and powerless. Men and women. Public and hidden. Loud and quiet. Snapshots. Urbs, Urbis. A call from the city: Look here, here we are, here we live, here we work. Marc Lins’ perspective is that of a contemporary who works at eye level with his protagonists. He, who has also roamed the urban canyons of New York, lets us rediscover Feldkirch: as a place of different viewing – and thus defines the urban space as a movement zone for people, where life unfolds far from glossy aesthetics. One almost wants to use the famous and notorious word “authentic”. In this sense, Mensch Feldkirch is a picture book that tells us a thousand little stories. Of strangely familiar otherness in a living space grammatically populated by various personal pronouns: of you, of me, of us, of you all.
For every kiss you give me, I’ll give you three. Ronettes Be My Baby
Text: Hermann Brändle