Otmar Thormann: Ursprung [signed]

“As a five-year-old I witnessed brutal scenes of slaughtering, but there was no-one I could talk to about them. Like knots on a piece of string I stored those images within me, images I could rarely make head nor tail of.” Otmar Thormann is a Graz-born, Stockholm-based photographer. “Ursprung” also situates itself within the Austrian canon of art and literature exploring the nation’s dubious past. Photography as a vehicle for awareness, of coming to terms with one’s past. “Ursprung” is Otmar Thormann’s powerful grappling with undesirable memories from his childhood. Otmar Thormann’s latest work takes the form of an artist’s book sustained by the artist’s own collection of photographs, its stringent selection by the photographer himself resulting in an immutable sequence. The spectrum ranges from the street photography of his early beginnings, with gloomy images of post-war Graz and Vienna, to the surrealism-influenced still lifes taken in his Stockholm studio since the 1970s. On this (equally autobiographical) quest for the origins of his interest in photography, Otmar Thormann has delved deep into the strata of his oeuvre and his own persona, linking his classic photographs (which include early family photos of his father) into an associative medley of images. References to Josef Sudek are hinted at alongside reminiscences of Hans Bellmer and Christer Stromhölm. The book is complemented by eleven short stories by the artist which, tersely yet mysteriously, relate in flashback the author’s sense of wonder at the strange incidents and events in his (photographic) life.