Hi! My name is Hanna Pribitzer, and I am a photographer from Vienna with a love for serial photography and neurotic concepts.

Welcome to the website for my project Vienna Zines. I photograph the streets of Vienna in alphabetical order on analog film and create (maga)zines for each street.

One could say this project came to life in an act of desperation. I had finished my photography education with a diploma project wherein my collegue Michael Krebs and I founded a company for analog special effect films called Revolog. We soon had massive amounts of film material to test and I didn’t want to just randomly shoot them. I also felt quite uninspired. An unlucky mix. I’ve always liked street photography and architecture, but having lived in Vienna my whole life, I felt like I had seen it all. Then it hit me: I would go to the alphabetically first street of Vienna (Abbegasse, which is located in Vienna’s 14th district) and see if I could get some inspiration there. That was back in 2010. It took a couple of years though until this project found its current form. Good ideas sometimes need some time to ripen. It was in 2014, when I received a free pocket street map, that  I picked up my idea again. From 2015 on I started to regularly visit the streets of Vienna, camera in hand.

What started as a means to an end, a way to find new motives to test my films with, became a project on its own. When I found myself with hundreds of photos in my archive, I wanted to share them in a way I found suitable. Just dumping them on a website didn’t give them the space I thought they deserved. I had been toying with the idea to create little magazines for each street, but it wasn’t until 2018 when I saw a talk by Viennese typographers Typejokeys at OFFF Vienna, that I had found the final inspiration for the graphic design of the zines. Typejokeys have created a font called Henriette, which is a tribute to the font of the Viennese street signs. Hello Corporate Identity, hello Vienna Zines!

This project has become so much more than just a neurotic photography venture to me. It pushes my creativity to find new inspiration in all kinds of places in Vienna, and it is also helping my mental health. Especially during the first months of the Covid19 pandemic, when there was little else to do than taking walks, it turned out to be really promotional for my well being. And although, realistically, I won’t be able to reach Z until the end of my life, it is calming to know that I have something to do for the upcoming decades. I would even go so far to say it has grown from a photography project to a mindfulness journey.

I hope you will all be travelling along with me for a long time!

The images above were taken by the wonderful photographer Jennifer Fetz, who accompanied me while I photographed at Albertgasse and Albertplatz in 2020. Be sure to visit her website or even better, book her for a photoshoot!