Vienna’s outer ring road, the Gürtel, forms a boundary between the inner and the outer districts of Austria’s capital. Once a respectable address for socially aspiring families, it is now one of the city’s busiest traffic corridors. Parts of the Gürtel have long been associated with Vienna’s red-light district.
At night, clubs, bars and music venues draw a young crowd. Their presence overlaps with licensed sex establishments, employees, clients, and people living on the margins of society. The district functions as a zone of nightlife, commerce, and transit.
In daylight, the atmosphere changes. Neon is off. Doors are closed. What remains are façades, shuttered entrances, signage, security systems of establishments that exist and disappear in a never-ending cycle.
In daylight, theatrical elements recede, revealing the structural framework of a regulated, guarded trade operating in plain view.
Daylight reveals the absurdities of female bodies – the bodies of women who invariably must be called girls, not women! – reduced to ridiculously contorted monstrosities seeking to attract the male gaze.
These photographs were made in July 2020, after the first COVID-related lockdown in Austria on the Gürtel between Westbahnhof and Volksoper. Some premises had already gone out of business by then, others have since closed, and others have opened since.
