Coming attractions: Preselecting work for Lürzer's Archive Vol. 6-18

This past week I was busy preselecting the print submissions for the final issue of Lürzer's Archive this year. There were some 2,000 print submissions to comb through. Next week it'll be film, where there are about 300 commercials submitted to feature in 6-2018.

This is perhaps as good an occasion as any to introduce a couple of new team members at the Lürzer's HQ in Vienna. Sonja Ryszienski, who some of you have been in contact with is back in Graz and having a baby (very soon). To replace her for the time being we have Aida Aly who, in various functions and off and on, has been working with us for the past three years. She’s only recently been promoted to one of our associate editors. With her sharp eye and attention to detail, she is in charge of requesting new print work with agencies as well our online version of Lürzer’s, trying to make sure our articles are top-notch before being published. Among her responsibilities as part of our editorial team, she handles all the credits and captions (German and English) that you see in our magazine. She is originally American/Egyptian and was born and raised in Cairo, where she attended a German high school and then moved to Vienna for her Bachelor’s degree four years ago. Talk about a multicultural background! She’s currently working on her Master’s degree in communication research, while also teaching at the University of Vienna. When she hasn’t got her nose buried in a book, she can usually be found in the kitchen whipping up new recipes, or so she tells me.

Sonja's colleague, Anna Maltschnig, who used to take care of all the film submissions, the New Books section as well as help put together the Digital section of the magazine is also gone, working on private projects which include poetry and illustration and to me seems to be occupied full-time in trying to become an honorary citizen of Iceland (judging by the amount of time she spends on that island). Her shoes are now filled by Natalia Michalak, who spends most of her time watching TV spots – what a life! And what a great help: While I still look at every single print ad that comes in and decide whether to feature it in the next issue of the magazine, I simply don't have the time to do that with the submitted films (now with online films, these have gotten longer and longer, which is where Natalia comes in and relieves me of having to watch them all.) Apart from that, her field of assignments is wide-spread, from taking care of social media, keeping in touch with agencies, and finding new talent to administrative work at our headquarters in Vienna. After all, every company needs compassionate employees. She is originally from Poland and migrated to Austria, Styria, to be exact, 11 years ago and now lives in Vienna. Her German is such that you wouldn't know that she grew up speaking another language and her English sounds nothing like that of the world's most famous Styrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. She is doing a master’s degree in media translation and her interests lie in the fields of photography (more often in front of the camera than behind being much in demand as a so-called "curvy" model), film, music, languages and sports. I very much appreciate her critical eye.

Below, a few examples from my print harvest for Volume 6. The "preselected" status is of course always subject to change as I am keeping on the look out for extraordinary print ads until the very last possible moment (much to the chagrin of my colleagues in Vienna) but the campaigns I have selected here are as likely as can be to wind up in the final issue of the year. Except for the ad that I also used as the main image on here, I'm not divulging any credits at this point. If you are one of hte submitters of the ads seen below, you will know that your work has been preselected. All the others will have to guess where the work comes from - or wait a couple of months till 6-2018 is out.