"Wittgensteinhaus, Wien"

1566-07

gelatin silver print (analogue)

When she enters a room, Margherita Spiluttini immediately sees photos; it's completely automatic, says the photo artist. She does not have a patent recipe for photographing architecture, whether it be single-family homes, interiors or engineering structures. Nevertheless, one recognizes an attitude in her work, an artistic claim that commands respect for the building just as much as for the circumstances under which the photo was taken. The spectacle is not what she seeks in building objects, but rather subtleties in the spatial structure, subtle interventions, materialities, peculiarities that are only recognizable at second glance, which make up an object and its surroundings.
(Anna Soucek)

One of her favorite motifs are places of transition, staircases, bridges, passageways. With her photographs, she seeks the stylistic differences in the spaces where people briefly meet, where a special, casual form of communication emerges - a form that, in its cropping, resembles that exchange of the camera with life that Spiluttini already chose in her early, diary-like photographs. These places reflect life in its condensed short-term and also randomness.
(Sabine Vogel)

Let us assume that in photography we are not dealing with two realities, with two levels or qualities of reality, but only with one, which only enters our brain from two different positions via the retina. It would be conceivable that the image on the retina does not make as much difference between the original and the image as we imagine. Yes, it would even be conceivable a change between these realities, a confusion, an exchange of identities in the brain: a photo, for example, which corresponds more to the reality of the original than the random image of the original on the retina. How else would it be conceivable that people see things only after they have been photographed? How else would it be possible for photography to conquer ever new areas of reality or ways of seeing reality? - So the good photographer is a deceiver, a deceiver of reality?"
(Friedrich Achleitner, from: Über das Abbild und das Abgebildete, Vienna 1985 and 2007)