Irrläufer collects photographs that ended up in an archive by accident, filed and kept though no one meant to keep them.
Working through roughly 100,000 press-clipping images accumulated over fifty years by the steirischer herbst festival archive in Graz, Piller pulled out the pictures that had nothing to do with the festival: images printed on the reverse of unrelated articles, misfiled prints, stray material with no clear place in the collection. Issued as Materialien (H) in 2017, the 112-page booklet arranges these accidental survivors into a small, deadpan catalogue, letting the mistakes of one archive tell a separate, unintended story.
It is one volume in Piller's long-running Archiv Peter Piller, a series of small Nieves booklets that sort found and vernacular photography, from provincial newspaper morgues to police files, into plain alphabetized categories such as Materialien and Spekulationen.
Notes
Confirmed distinct from the library's existing Piller title: catalogue ids 881/882 hold 'Umschläge' (Dashwood Books, 2014, softcover, 60pp, ISBN not on record), a different book entirely. 'Materialien (H) – Irrläufer' is a separate 2017 Nieves booklet, part of the same ongoing 'Archiv Peter Piller' series of small booklets sorting found/archival material into named categories ('Materialien', 'Spekulationen', 'Irrläufer', etc). 'Irrläufer' is German for a stray or misdirected item (literally 'wanderer gone astray'; used for misdirected mail) — here naming photographs that ended up in the steirischer herbst festival's press archive in Graz by accident. Piller's own site lists the publication line as 'Steirischer Herbst, Graz, 2017' with a credit/link to Nieves as publisher/distributor; the Nieves webshop lists it directly under its own ISBN (978-3-905999-83-9) and price, so it is treated here as a Nieves-published title per the task brief, with the steirischer herbst connection noted. Cover/teaser image is the artist's own site's official image for this title (Sanity CMS asset, original filename '39 JF3A8508 150.jpg'); it was not explicitly labeled 'cover' by either source, so treat as best-available representative image rather than a confirmed scanned front cover. Subjects (LOC): Piller, Peter, 1968- -- Archives; Found photography -- Germany; Photographic archives -- Austria -- Graz; Artists' books -- Switzerland.
