Opening and book presentation: September 30, 2025
Exhibition goes until November 21, 2025
at the AnzenbergerGallery
Absberggasse 27, 1100 Vienna
Opening hours: Wed - Fri 12 to 6 pm or by appointment

Barely 20 years old in 1972, Fritz Simak broke new ground with radical photographic works that established him as a pioneer of conceptual photography – images for which, in the words of Peter Weibel, “he deserves a central place in this era”. The photographer drew his subjects from the world around him: the rural surroundings of his childhood in Lower Austria, the student cafés of Vienna, architecture and the visual arts. Yet the material for his work has never been the reality captured by the camera, but the light that makes his images possible in the first place.

Simak’s luminous pictures reflect his relationship with the world and offer us new ways of seeing it. In 1976, he captured snow drifts in the Weinviertel as no one had done before. That same year saw the release of Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”. The album’s iconic track “I Wish” became inextricably linked for Simak with the landscapes and atmospheres of his childhood, “sneaking out the back door”.

By then he was already studying art history at the University of Vienna, where he would later write the first-ever dissertation on a contemporary photographic subject: the work of Austrian-American photographer Ernst Haas. Haas himself once remarked of Simak, “There is music in his pictures.”

Fritz Simak’s “Photographs in the Key of Life” take us not only on a journey through his oeuvre but also deep into the very nature of photography itself.