photography - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2012 - 70 Euro Cent

Her photographic stagings are everyday culture, her advertising posters are art in public space - hardly any other Austrian photographer can currently achieve such a high level of international success as Elfie Semotan. Her photo with the simple title "Stöckl", a portrait of the well-known ORF presenter Claudia Stöckl, graces the present special stamp, which represents the second value of the series "Photographic Art Austria", which was started in the previous year. About Elfie Semotan: Born in 1941 in Wels and for years one of the outstanding personalities of contemporary photography, she first worked as a model in Paris, before she switched to the camera at the end of the sixties and started her successful career as a photographer. Over the past few decades, her work has been published in internationally renowned journals with names like Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, New Yorker, and so forth. In Austria, Semotan is known above all for its long-term cooperation with Helmut Lang as well as for their campaigns for Palmers and Römerquelle, which caused a great stir each time. The impressive work of the photo artist, who lives in New York, Vienna and southern Burgenland, is characterized first and foremost by the blurring of the boundaries between fashion photography and artistic photography. The focus is on the intense and personal engagement with the depicted persons, without distinction, whether they are people from the street, models or famous personalities. Of course, her fashion photography is never entirely dedicated to the genre, but it always lacks the usual glorification of a beauty ideal. Stereotypical poses are avoided, the actors are at the mercy of the camera and are portrayed as what they are primary: human beings with individual qualities, traits and emanations. The attitude of the actors and the resulting tension causes the clothing, the setting and other equipment to take a back seat. Recurring is the idea of ​​the model as a doll, as a symbol of an alien-controlled being, which is held in its awkwardness and his personal fears in seemingly frozen poses. In portraits and free works, Elfie Semotan uses cool and calculating means of fashion photography to reveal the essentials directly and to come across the core of the statement without detours. It unleashes a power that would not normally be expected of the perfectly staged artificiality of fashion photography. Psychological and sociological subtleties are met with pinpoint accuracy - more convincing than many photographers in the field of conventional social reportage succeed.