Softcover, edition of 400 copies, concept by Michael Reitter-Kollmann, text by Reiner Riedler, in conversation with Rebekka Reuter, desgin by  Bernd Eischeid. This poster book is published in conjunction with the exhibition REINER RIEDLER - THIS SIDE OF PARADISE at WestLicht Museum for Photography, Vienna, from arch 4th , 2022, to May 15.

A chronicler of longing: Over the course of his career of more than thirty years, Reiner Riedler has created a comprehensive body of work that has also been widely acclaimed internationally.

Anchored in classical documentary photography, the Vienna-based artist focuses primarily on the profoundly human pursuit of happiness.

To this end, he prefers to seek out places that promise at least a short-term escape from everyday life: Artificial worlds of leisure, which he has unmaskingly documented in his well-known series Fake Holidays, a Russian Circus that stops off as a magical counter-image in the middle of a post-socialist prefabricated concrete slab tourist resort, the pleasure gardens of the swinger and fetish club scene, the venues of modern event culture, whose excesses he captures in his as yet unpublished long-term project This Side of Paradise, or the Viennese music clubs and dance cafés shut down due to the pandemic in his most recent series End of the Night.

Even in his early works, he shows a special flair for sensitive portraits. As shown, for example, in the series Homeless, Albania, and Ukraine, some of which are still photographed in black and white, he manages to photograph people even in precarious situations without ever exposing them.

The show is rounded out by Riedler's conceptual groups of works, in which he not least questions the medium itself: for example, with the illuminated film reels from The Unseen Seen, he evokes emotions surrounding cinema as a place of longing, and in the series Sweat, with the sweat imprints of human bodies, he refers to a basic principle of the photographic process.

Riedler's work has been exhibited at numerous photo festivals around the world and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among other venues. With THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, WestLicht now presents for the first time a show of the photographer's work that spans a broad arc across his entire oeuvre.

https://www.ostlicht.org/site/shopliste/books/shop.item/40518.html