Pictures of the world are not always pictures of the overall visible world. They speak of the hidden things, overlooked situations, the edges of the existence, of this inconspicuous way of life.
Reinhart Mlineritsch is a photographer with love for this inconspicuousness; he discovers the unspectacular views, the half-dead stepped grass, the unattractive ponds. The architectures, that he is interested in, are not “buildings”, but those that somehow became buildings without Intention: underpasses, abandoned houses, building sites with their lumps of waste material and the attractive views of material lying around on the grounds. He gives meaning to these “un-places” by discovering them for his photographs; he extracts them from anonymity and gives them revaluation, by seeing “dignity” in them and making them worthy for being pictured. He searches the bushes beside the roads and gives the structures of plants their own flair. In his strict black-and-white contrasts, he examines the edges of waters and outflows for sharp graphic elements and laminar grey tones; he gives dynamism and tension to the boredom of a stubble-field or a stockpile by making it rhythmic in horizontal surfaces with diagonal slopes. This view into the world of the small and hidden usually turns out as a series of still-lives. His world is deserted and quiet. His places remain unchanged since eternal times, as if they work against time. Sudden events don’t fit them and they seem unaffected by the changes of a fast living society. His compositions are minutely calculated and intimately composed; he leaves nothing to coincidence or to momentary effects. And his habit to work straight through the night in his darkroom has become legendary: no prints, that he hasn’t developed personally, controlled several times, if necessary, improved some marks and finally increased perfectly, leave his Studio.
Born in 1950 in Vienna/Austria the photographer approached photography as an autodidact and quietly created a convincing photographic oeuvre over the past 20 years. He feels obligated to a classical traditional type of documentary photography; for him it represents the counterweight to a flood of digital pictures and to a loud Propaganda of new technologies. (Margit Zuckriegl, IZ-Magazine No. 4 2006, Istanbul, Turkey).