He rarely takes up his camera. Markus Mittringer is not your typical, hectic snapshot shooter whom we know from all cultural and artistic events, who stubbornly searches to make a thoroughly valuable contribution to recording such events. If I remember correctly, I have never even seen him carrying a camera and yet it seems to have been much more typical for him to have documented his explorations in photos. We speak, without really contemplating the meaning of the phrase, of the “decisive moment,” and we value the recognition and recording of this moment. But what makes up this momentariness? In traditional reportage photography, it describes an instant, mostly a spectacular event, that captures the beginning of a motion.

His unique trait, however, is seen in the way he also searches out and discovers that which is essential, behind the sensational event. That is one of the commonalities that ties him together with Markus Mittringer, just as much as the subject’s motion. Photographers like Markus Mittringer require movement. Reality is perceived through a projected moving picture. Sounds are pushed into the background; moving scenes are transformed in rhythmic mental images that are ideally recorded at precisely the right moment. To describe these as scenes from life would be an all-too banal characterization. After all, Markus Mittringer neither fixates the selected protagonist in the focus of his lens nor does he attempt to feel their physical presence.
(Parts of a text by Alfred Weidinger)

Markus Mittringer (* 1965) has witnessed the Austrian art scene for more than twenty-five years. After his studies of Art History, Philosophy, and Theater Science at the University of Vienna, he worked as a writer and art critic for the Austrian dailies Die Presse and Der Standard, was a contributing journalist to, among others, Monopol and the Frankfurter Allgemenine Zeitung, and wrote for art catalogs for the Vienna Secession, MUMOK, and Tate Liverpool. He lectures regularly at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Markus Mittringer is a corresponding member of the Vienna Secession.