The catalogue accompanies a body of work situated between photography, installation, and conceptual practice, reflecting Trauttmansdorff’s interest in urban space, perception, and the structures that shape everyday environments.

Trauttmansdorff’s work in the late 1990s often focused on the city as a field of observation. Through photographic research and spatial interventions, he examined how social, architectural, and political conditions manifest in visual form. His practice moves between documentation and construction, treating images not as neutral records but as elements within a broader conceptual framework.

The catalogue reflects this approach. Rather than functioning as a purely documentary record of the exhibition, it brings together images and texts in a way that emphasizes process, sequence, and context. Photography appears as both method and subject: a tool for registering urban realities and a means of questioning how those realities are framed and understood.

In this sense, the publication can be read as an extension of Trauttmansdorff’s artistic practice. It situates his work within the discourse of late 1990s conceptual and site-related art, while also foregrounding the role of the book as a space in which observation, analysis, and representation intersect. Octavian Trauttmansdorff was published in 1999 on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession (28 April – 6 June 1999).