Andreas Bitesnich:
What Makes a Good Photograph?

WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW AND BRYON PAUL MCCARTNEY

Andreas Bitesnich didn't object to his job selling electrical appliances in a store. It paid the bills. He was content. He was 22 and married. He had a son to bring up and good friends in his home town of Vienna.

He sometimes looked back fondly to his military service when he shot passport photographs for identity cards. He recalled the feel of the camera in his hands. The magic of images appearing in the developing tray. His most memorable task had been shooting rolls of film of the Pope arriving at the military airbase in Klosterneuburg. He still had those pictures somewhere.

He did sometimes have a nagging feeling at the pit of his stomach that he wasn't doing the right thing. He was doing the right thing by his family, for sure, but he knew deep down that he wasn't carving his own path, fulfilling his own potential. You get one shot at life, he thought, you have to make the most of it.

One spring afternoon when the trees in Vienna were filled with blossom he was having coffee in one of the pastry houses with a friend from Milan. His friend happened to work as a photographer's assistant and happened to be carrying a portfolio of black and white fashion photographs.

Bitesnich looked at those photographs and the spark that lit up his mind would turn into a forest fire. His throat was dry. But he felt alive. More alive than he had ever felt, more alive than he could ever feel selling electrical appliances in a store.

It was the beginning of Bitesnich's double life. Next day, during his lunch break, he bought a Nikon F3 and started shooting everything that appeared before his lens, the trees in blossom, white lines of tumble dryers, his wife putting on her makeup. He converted the family bathroom into a photography lab and while film hung over the bath to dry he studied photography books with all the passion of a sceptic finding religion. What is that makes a good photograph? Light. Form. Enthusiasm. Yes, all of those. Even something he had learned in the Austrian army: discipline. And something more: subject matter. What touches your soul?

For two years he led a double life, selling washing machines by day and at night teaching himself how to shoot, develop, crop and produce cool, reserved, vibrant images that in a surprisingly short time would find Andreas Bitesnich described in the top German magazine Photographie as "one of the most outstanding photographers internationally today."

In 1989 he took a chance and jumped into the void. He acquired a 6 x 7 Mamiya without the money in the bank to cover the cost and paid for it three weeks later after completing his first commission. He met a model who needed some nude shots to complete her portfolio. She was dead nervous. Bitesnich was even more nervous than when he'd shot a rifle for the first time in the Austrian army. They were in a studio twenty metres long and while she undressed and posed at one end, he remained at the other, shooting with a telephoto lens like he was spitting rounds down the range.

Born in 1964 and now coming up to thirty, Bitesnich was at the beginning of his true purpose in life: to shoot nudes that are "sex-drenched, dynamic and shapely," (Black & White Magazine, Australia); nudes that are "almost too hot to handle," (Blue Magazine, Australia); nudes that are "superbly choreographed with great love for detail and full of the suspense that belongs to the best erotic photographers in the world," (Max, Germany).

Andreas Bitesnich had first come to nude photography thinking that everything in the field had already been done but quickly realised that there will always be new ways to see the human body, "something unique that you must discover for yourself."

His nudes display a cool, reserved eroticism. They are aesthetically pleasing, as pure as an architect's drawing, but remain objects of sexual desire. He doesn't have the baggage of an art background or training as a photographer. What Bitesnich creates comes from his gut, that feeling that inspired him to take up the camera in the first place. When he works with a model they are two jazz musicians jamming: an object and its shadow, following each other. They don't know what's going to happen. They let it happen.

From this free-flowing approach, the results are oddly disciplined. The nude body in his shots may be curved, twisted and shaped like wet clay or soft metal into sculptural abstraction but become the quintessence of perfection, specimens of ethereal beauty. "Everything is graphical," says Bitesnich, "and has as much to do with space, with the balance within the space that the frame provides." The light in a Bitesnich image gives the surface of human skin a sensuous texture and hanging on gallery walls the temptation is to reach out and touch them they seem so real.

Only in the last three years has he begun to experiment with colour. "I started with black-and-white and had perfect control over developing and processing – for ten years I created my own prints. When I was searching for a step into a new direction, the gate to colour photography opened and it was like a breath of fresh air. Occasionally I go back to black-and-white photography. I still love it. But the feeling for colour photography determines my imagination now, quite like a musician who has found a new instrument." A jazz musician, clearly

Once Andreas Bitesnich had started taking photographs there was no question of going back to the electrical store. His first paid job was shooting a catalogue for a hotel. He did fashion shoots for local magazines, architectural photography and he took pictures of a computer screen for a video company. He was sitting in his studio one winter afternoon. It was only 3 o'clock and already getting dark when the telephone rang and it was Playboy magazine. Was he free to do a shoot? He was so shocked by this surprise call he said he'd think about it and then had a sleepless night regretting that he just didn't say yes and jump at the chance.

Maybe his nonchalant response to Playboy gave Bitesnich an unexpected edge. When then the magazine editor called again next day, he gave him complete freedom to chose the model he wanted and to shoot in black and white. His spread in the German edition of Playboy was really the beginning.