Sebastian Gansrigler was born in Austria in 1994 and works as an independent photographer and graphic designer in Vienna. Out of personal interest and a love of photography, he and a small team — Veronika Gansrigler, Martina Schreiner, Kay von Aspern, and Niko Havranek — kept meeting photographers and listening to their stories, until the idea of publishing those stories grew too large to ignore. In March 2019, the first issue of Auslöser appeared: a biannual, bilingual (German and English) indie print magazine focused on the human stories behind the camera.
The structure is precise and consistent. Each issue contains four in-depth photographer interviews — always two women and two men, combining the young with the old, the famous with the unknown, blending backgrounds and cultures regardless of theme or category. A second section offers a behind-the-scenes reportage of a company, workshop, printing house, darkroom, or studio: issue one visited Steidl, the legendary German art book publisher; issue two documented the Breitenseer Lichtspiele, the oldest still-running cinema in the world; issue three went inside the Vienna Secession. A third section portraits a single camera per issue, selected from the WestLicht camera museum, focusing on aesthetics rather than technical specifications. Issue one featured the Susse Frères Daguerréotype — the first commercially produced camera in the world.
Printed in compact A5 format, 160 pages, Swiss-brochure bound, Auslöser is sold in over 50 galleries, museum shops, and bookstores worldwide, from Vienna to China, and held in university libraries from Zurich to Amsterdam. Many readers have said it feels more like a book than a magazine — or, as Allan Porter once described his Camera magazine, a museum without walls. In Gansrigler’s case: a museum on 160 pages. In 2023, he extended the project into Softcover, a curated shop for photo books, indie magazines, and zines in Vienna’s sixth district.
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