Artists: Eric Asamoah | John Crawford | Josep Maria de Llobet | Lucinda Devlin | Stanley Donwood | Göran Gnaudschun | Sven Grot | Otto Hainzl | Dina Hovsepian | Eva Leitolf | Marie-Eve Levasseur | Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López | Gulia Piersanti | Margot Pilz | Mark Ruwedel | Chris Saupper | Eva Schlegel | Berit Schneidereit | David Spittle | Joel Sternberg | Patrick Topitschnig.

Authors: Thomas Ballhausen | Anja Bohnhof | Kristin Dittrich | Bettina Egger | Patrizia Feichter | Wolfgang Giegler | Esther Heltschl | Simone Obretenova | Walter Seidl | David Spittle | Gudrun Zacharias.

Languages | German / English
Format | 280 x 210 mm
ISBN | 978-3-904083-30-0
144 pages
Price: € 18,00 (incl. 10% VAT)

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CONTENTS

FOCUS:
IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE – LUCINDA DEVLIN: THE OMEGA SUITES – Gudrun Zacharias
STRANGE LIGHT – Thomas Ballhausen & David Spittle
THE SOUND OF FEAR – Simona Obretenova
APPARENT FINDINGS – Anja Bohnhof
MAPPING MONSTERS – Thomas Ballhausen

PORTFOLIO:
JOSEP MARIA DE LLOBET – Patrizia Feichter
GÖRAN GNAUDSCHUN – Gudrun Zacharias
BERIT SCHNEIDEREIT – Esther Heltschl
PATRICK TOPITSCHNIG – Gudrun Zacharias
DAS SZARKOWSKI-PRINZIP – a New Event for the Future of Photography in Vienna – Kristin Dittrich

EXHIBITIONS:
EVA SCHLEGEL – FALLING UP – Wolfgang Giegler
ERIC ASAMOAH – AS OUR HEARTS BOW – Patrizia Feichter
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARGOT PILZ! – Simona Obretenova
OTTO HAINZL – Wolfgang Giegler
EIKON AWARD OFF BRATISLAVA
PARIS FOTO
PUBLICATIONS
COLLECTOR’S EDITION
NEW RELEASES
TIPS & NEWS
CONTRIBUTORS
IMPRINT

EDITORIAL

Dear Readers!

Not everything that we see is truly revealed to our gaze. And not everything that frightens us is visible. Sometimes the uncanny lies exactly within what is familiar, in the seemingly harmless, in that which images leave unsaid. Under the title Into Darkness – The Unseeable, the current issue of EIKON explores the diverse manifestations of horror and, with that, also the limits of perception where the visible shifts into the uncertain.
In her series The Omega Suites, Lucinda Devlin reveals exactly how disturbing that, which an image does not show, can be. In it, she documented the execution chambers of U.S. prisons during the 1990s. In their oppressive austerity, the desolate interiors reveal a violence which remains invisible.
In conversation with EIKON, Devlin reflects, three decades later, on a work which would no longer be possible today and whose images take on an uncomfortable relevance amid a political climate in which the death penalty is yet again being aggressively wielded as an expression of state power. On the other hand, the crime scene photographs of Joel Sternfeld and Eva Leitolf, which Anja Bohnhof explores in Apparent Findings, show how deceiving the first glance can be. Behind the supposed harmlessness of everyday places and landscapes lurk stories of the abysses of human nature. Only through the accompanying texts does the unseeable emerge.
But not everything that is uncanny can be disintegrated into words. In conversation with Thomas Ballhausen, the filmmaker and poet David Spittle navigates the intermediate zones of liminality where familiar orders are disrupted and the monstrous becomes the starting point of new insights. In The Sound of Fear, Simona Obretenova illustrates how fear can take shape even where the image falls silent. Her exploration of film soundtracks reveals how sounds can open up spaces of threat and make the eerie immediately sensible on a bodily level.
Beyond the thematic focus, the portfolios of Patrick Topitschnig, Berit Schneidereit, Göran Gnaudschun and Josep Maria de Llobet unfold unique artistic perspectives. Schneidereit’s multi-faceted image spaces defy unambiguous perception with their overlays and transparent structures, while de Llobet takes the long-hidden interior of the former Modelo prison in Barcelona into the public space with large-format photographs displayed on its outer wall. This versatility is also an expression of a two-hundred-year history in which photography has constantly reinvented itself and transformed the way we view the world. The upcoming Paris Photo promises a spectacular journey through this development by bringing together historical positions as well as contemporary and digital experiments. Yet a contradiction remains despite the expansion of possibilities: with every new image, our knowledge of the world grows, but not necessarily our understanding of it. Precisely the images of the uncanny bring this discrepancy to light. Their horror does not lie only in what they show us, but also in the unsettling certainty that the visible never tells the whole story.

Gudrun Zacharias,
EIKON, November 2026

THANK YOU TO
All Experts for their Statements

ART DIRECTION & DESIGN
Martin Hassler

TRANSLATION
Urška Longer