In 1944, Herbert List entered Präuscher’s Panoptikum in Vienna’s Prater and photographed its life-size wax figures. His subjects were neither conventional portraits nor straightforward records of an attraction: fairy-tale scenes, historical tableaux and medical displays become an uneasy population suspended between animation and death. Under List’s camera, painted expressions and emphatic poses expose the peculiar tension of bodies made to appear present while remaining irrevocably inert.
List conceived these photographs as an illustrated book, pairing the sequence with his own incisive text. Yet the project remained unpublished during his lifetime. Spector Books’ 2022 edition returns to his original draft, presenting the work more than seventy-five years after the images were made. This is therefore not simply a retrospective gathering of pictures, but the realization of a specific book concept in which image order, subject groupings and writing belong to the work’s intended form.
The setting gives the project a broader historical charge. Vienna’s nineteenth-century Panoptikum brought popular science into contact with spectacle, while its displays also drew upon sensationalized ideas of erotica and exoticism. List’s treatment of this environment accords with the Surrealist and New Objectivity influences that shaped his early practice: the camera observes surfaces precisely, yet that precision intensifies the irrational atmosphere. An accompanying commentary places the photographs within both List’s career and the cultural history of the institution.
Across 192 pages and 112 black-and-white illustrations, the thread-sewn hardcover is complemented by a detachable booklet. For collectors attentive to the photobook as an authored structure, Panoptikum is significant because it restores a long-deferred project rather than merely surveying a photographer’s archive. It isolates a concentrated episode in List’s work and preserves the conjunction he devised between photography, text and the disturbing theatricality of the wax museum.
