Inn Window, Austria

Frank Hofmann looks up, his camera framing a lively arrangement of curving and mottled shadows, unruly geraniums, and trompe-l'œil baroque designs. The image balances a feeling of lyricism with straightforward immediacy and a certain coolness typical of the rigorous objectivity of New Vision Photography. Before the war, the new democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia was a leading centre of interwar modernism. Hofmann joined the Prague Photographic Society as a teenager and it was during this time that he became exposed to the camera’s potential to express a modern soul and spirit. Inn, Austria utilises strategies that were critical to the modern photography movements in the twenties and thirties. The image employs ambiguity, a lyrical interplay of line, shape, light and shadow, strange angles, and above all a transformation of the ordinary. New Zealand art historian Len Bell reinforces the importance of these new techniques: ‘Hofmann’s deployment of pattern, unusual angles, light and shadow, transform those objects into wondrous things and abstract configurations, compelling in themselves’. Although the image may appear somewhat abstract and detached, Hofmann characterised a good photograph as ‘intensified feeling’, and when you look up at the window it is difficult not to be invigorated by the lively interplay of shadows, shapes and textures.

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