Elfie Semotan can look back on more than 50 years of photographic work, which has been documented in numerous exhibitions and publications and which the public predominantly assigns to the field of editorial portrait and fashion photography. Access to Semotan’s extensive archive now for the first time makes it possible to take a comprehensive look at the private sphere in her work. The focus is on the family, the artistic circle of friends, landscapes and still lifes as existential metaphors. This book pays tribute to Elfie Semotan as one of the early and important protagonists of author photography in Austria. The artist’s image archive served and continues to serve her as a source for new arrangements of individual images and image series. They clearly show Semotan’s passion and talent for giving shape and poetry to the trivial world of things.

Elfie Semotan, *1941 in Wels, Austria. Lives and works in New York, Vienna and Jennersdorf, Austria.