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While exploring the society he grew up in, Elias Holzknecht (AT) ended up in the village of Micheldorf in Upper Austria by chance. There he found beauty in the everyday: a small community of almost 6,000 people who sleep, eat, walk, and work, and for whom Micheldorf is the centre of their lives.

As he engaged with village life, he became increasingly aware that no form of representation could do justice to the complexity of a social space. Micheldorf could not be squeezed into a single narrative: even the name was ambiguous, as three other Micheldorfs exist in the same country. The story therefore concentrates not on one, but on all four eponymous localities.

The result is a body of work that takes a critical look at how photography can depict a place and the people who live there. Micheldorf Micheldorf Micheldorf Micheldorf gives the impression of a linear narrative, a typological study of an Austrian village, a feeling that is reinforced by the modernist design approach. However, there are several versions of the same book, a conceptual element that is already hinted at in the title. Each version contains the same images and fragments of dialogue, but in a different order, highlighting the complexity of a story that at first glance seems clearly comprehensible.

This conceptual approach shows how the photographic construction of a narrative helps to create an image of a place and the people who live there, and invites the reader to think about Micheldorf beyond what is shown.

Elias Holzknecht is a freelance photographer based between Hannover (Germany) and Innsbruck (Austria). Studying Photojournalism and Documentary Photography in Hannover, he is interested in social and geopolitical issues. He is a founding member of the photographer community “What’s left of Photography”.