Margot Wallard, from the series: »Oran«, 2018−2022, Archival Pigment Print

Margot Wallard
»Oran«

>Opens: Thursday, 01.10.26, 7 pm
>Exhibition run: 02.10.−26.11.26

FOTOHOF | Inge-Morath-Platz 2 | 5020 Salzburg | Austria

»Project »Oran« begins with my grandmother. Through her photographs, letters and fragments of life, I returned to a place I had never known yet carried within me. Her archives became a point of departure — a way to approach a history shaped by memory, absence, and transmission.«
As the granddaughter of a »Pied-Noir« (a term used to describe the French population in Algeria during the violent French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962), Margot Wallard seeks to reflect the fluidity and mutability of memory and to expand it through a new perspective.
During her visits to Oran between 2018 and 2025, she explored the city with her camera and, while her biographical search for traces of the past, encountered a new generation: present, complex, and self-determined. This resulted in portrait series centered around the Bonbon Café, she photographed street scenes, urban vegetation, and the still-evident traces of the colonial past in the cityscape.
In her exhibition, Margot Wallard interweaves her grandmother’s photo archive with her own images from Algeria and with photographs she took of her grandmother during her final years in France.

 

Nicéphore Niépce, »Blick aus dem Arbeitszimmer von Le Gras«, 1826

»Salon of Photography: In Honor of Nicéphore Niépce«

>Opens: Thursday, 01.10.26, 7 pm
>Exhibition run: 02.10.−26.11.26

FOTOHOF>STUDIO | Inge-Morath-Platz 2 | 5020 Salzburg | Austria

The oldest surviving photograph was made by Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), marking the beginning of an epochal media invention that, originating with photography, has expanded into the broad field of “lens-based media” and continues to shape our perception of the world—today more than ever. His »View from the Window at Le Gras«(1826) has become an iconic metaphor for a functionality inherent to the new medium: visually fixing the outside world through an apparently objective apparatus, thereby making it comprehensible in a new way.
We want to celebrate the milestone of »200 Years of Photography« with an exhibition that offers an engaging and humorous glimpse into the studios of Salzburg photographers. The exhibition concept is based on an invitation to each artist to identify the earliest work within their own oeuvre and make it available for the exhibition, either as a vintage print or as a reconstruction.

The curatorial idea is founded on the assumption that this approach will make visible and open to discussion the diverse starting points and artistic concepts from which each photographer’s subsequent body of work developed. The number of participants will determine the form of the presentation: a »Salon de Paris« of the 19th century, characterized by an excessive spatial and conceptual concentration of highly diverse personalities and formal approaches.
2026 also marks the 45th anniversary of FOTOHOF, which has thus accompanied almost a quarter of the period since the invention of the medium. We are delighted to celebrate this (small) anniversary with a kind of community project bringing together Salzburg’s photographic artists.