"Mit großem Interesse, Burschi"

gelatin silver print

signed (pencil) and stamp on verso

Peter Dressler used staged images to tell "photo stories" in a metaphorical visual language. Public spaces that he found by chance and everyday situations served him as settings in which he made temporary interventions for his photographs.
The leitmotif for the photo cycle With Great Interest is a small paper sculpture of the little dog "Burschi", who wanders through the exhibition rooms of large museums and exhibition halls in Vienna but also in other cities. Peter Dressler took the figure of "Burschi" from an early photographic work entitled Zwischenspiel (Vienna, 1980s). This designation goes back to the inscription on a gravestone for a dog, it read "our dear good Burschi". The photo of a dog, which Peter Dressler regarded as the incarnation of the "Burschi", as its typical equivalent, was used by him to create this dog sculpture. With the work With great interest, Peter Dressler plays with the two-dimensionality of photography, the image within the image and the image and reality. The interventions themselves take place temporarily, as unobserved and unspectacular as possible. They can be undone and leave no traces - the casual, noble gesture of a flâneur.
(EIKON - International Magazine for Photography and Media Art, Fotohof Archive, Salzburg)