Wien Hotel

Photographing the lobbies of more than two hundred hotels in Vienna, Wolfgang Thaler succeeds in portraying an entire city, the hybrid face with which it welcomes and bids farewell to its guests. Photographing the lobby means taking a picture of a picture, mapping an image, capturing the spatial image, as official as it is incognito. (Andreas Spiegl)

I will argue that the hotel lobby, like Vienna's Ringstrasse, functioned as a centrifuge, a space that was an essential part of the vortex of modernity. (Rajesh Heynickx)

The lobby, the reception, is a shot; and the photographer is of course also a shot. So the photographer has used one shot to gain access to another. And vice versa.
(Lina Morawetz)

The hanging lamp thundered to the floor next to me and shattered into countless small pieces of glass. A woman with Asian looks flinched opposite me. (Josef Kleindienst)