Kindertagebucharbeit: ‘Kommt ein Vogel geflogen…’ – a photographic diary of a child (1973–1983) by Christoph Burtscher In 1973 my parents presented me my first camera – so I began taking photographs, when I was just a six year old boy. I observed my family and friends living and growing up in Vorarlberg, the western part of Austria, until 1983. Some years ago I began carefully sifting through these rediscovered family snaps which had survived two to three decades in some shoe cartons. While I tried to free the biographic picture material from its private family character and the context of the Seventies and early Eighties in such a way that the images are put to life in newly established sequences, I was often reminded of a quotation by the French writer and artist Hervé Guibert: 'If you open these cartons one day', he says, 'death jumps at you, but also life, both intertwined, covering and hidingeach other.'In order to keep the perspective of the boy, who took all of these family snaps, essays from primary school are accompanying the hotographs. One of them is called ‘A bird comes flying by…’ (1973): ‘A bird comes flying by. A mother found a bird. She wanted to bring the little bird to Franz. But than the mother bird came. Oh no, the mother bird grabbed the baby bird from her hand. You see how much the mother bird loves the baby bird.A mother has lost her child. The child went up a mountain. The second kid stayed home. Then the firemen came. But they were afraid to go up the mountain. Then the mother went up the mountain’.
