Portrait nominee

‘NOT GUILTY’ is the title of a moving and powerful photography project depicting the lives of 41 people who suffered as concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers under the regime of the Third Reich. Presented in portraits, the project serves as a living documentation of the era of National Socialism, focusing on the holocaust.
The project exposes the grief and abomination inflicted on the innocent whilst serving as a poignant reminder that in matters of self-reflection, political action and social responsibility, the memory of the holocaust serves as an exemplification that we can still learn from today.
Before long all of the remaining contemporary witnesses of the era of National Socialism will be gone, and with them an ‘oral history’ of the events which took place. Sebastian Holzknecht aims to document the last of the eyewitnesses by capturing them with his compelling portraits. After much planning and preparation, the exhibition ‘NOT GUILTY’ is the result of no less than three years of research, photography and fieldwork in Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Belarus.

The contemporary Austrian photographer Sebastian ‘Nepomuk’ Holzknecht was born in 1983 in Tyrol. In 2010 he graduated in ‘communication and media design’ at Innsbruck’s College for Business Studies, after which his training as a photographer commenced (Master of Photography). In 2011 Sebastian Holzknecht began teaching at the department for new media and fashion design at the College for Business Studies in Innsbruck. He is currently completing his master studies in visual sciences at the Danube University in Krems, Austria.

In 2015 his work will be shown internationally, including the National Portrait Gallery London,
the Millenium Gallery Sheffield and the New York Center for Photographic Art.

His photographic focus is on portrait, reportage and documentary photography, but also on his own work, such as the project „NOT GUILTY“ which the artist is currently working on.

Under the title "NOT GUILTY", the young artist developed his first independent project work as a photographic record of the past. The project contains a total of 41 large format portraits of the elderly survivors as well as installations and photographs, which have not yet been presented to the public as a whole, at original locations from Poland through Russia to Germany.