Richard is an artist's book by photographer and filmmaker Manuel Wetscher. It brings together a unique archive of photographs by his father Richard Jenewein, discovered years after he died of AIDS. With Richard's illness long concealed by the family, and the cause of his death only discovered by Manuel a decade later, the work questions the evocative power of an altered narrative. Within a universal family album documenting Manuel's childhood, sister and mother, from the late 80s to 1993, the book deals with the effects of a taboo and the poetic force of images.
"I got to know the real reason for my father's death ten years after he passed away. They first told me he died of pneumonia, later on they would say lung cancer. Finally the truth came out from a drunk relative at a birthday dinner. I was 17 years old.
I'd like to think of this book as a portrait of him. These photos are my memories of the time we spent together. Some of the images have perhaps become more real than the actual experiences. I think they will always change according to what I know and what I look for in them.
Now I know he died from Aids in 1993, when he was 40 years old. I've looked back for traces and evidence in the photos. What I found was beauty. The infection and pain are absent, just as they were hidden from me. These quite ordinary images of everyday life eventually became a prelude to questioning what a photograph doesn't show, or how, in reverse, it can generate different narratives for others.
This book brings together 915 slides, most of them taken by my father with his Nikon FE. The pictures were taken between 1983 and 1992, in India, Australia, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and around our hometown in Tirol, Austria. From a certain age, I would cut and mount many of these slides with him, and arrange them into slideshows to look at with friends and family in our home.
When he died, the slides went into my grandfather's cellar and remained unseen. 25 years later, they came back to me in this pink and turquoise bag from the 90s that we used to travel with, like a time capsule."
Manuel Wetscher
Manuel Wetscher (born 1986 in Schwaz, Austria, lives and works in Berlin and Brussels) is a photographer and filmmaker. His work includes fictional and experimental short films as well as artist books. His short films Magma (2022), At Night when Mice Scream (2021) and Four Seasons (2018) were shown at national and international film festivals. In 2022, he won the Carl Mayer Screenplay Prize of the City of Graz with Bernhard Jarosch. His artist book Bernards Skript (2022) was published by FOTOHOF edition. His themes are universal and often revolve around painful biographies, loss and the search for identity.
