This volume focuses on urban photographer Elfriede Mejchar, with important series from the 1960s to the present. Mejchar was working as a photographer for the Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments when she began to explore outlying areas such as the Simmeringer Haide, the Erdberger Mais or the Wienerberg, areas characterised by urban wastelands, market gardens, slaughterhouses, historical industrial buildings and ordinary workers’ homes. She took hundreds of photographs in this no-man’s-land between the city and the countryside, and it was clear already then that these areas would soon be giving way to throughways and carriageways, industrial zones, office complexes and research laboratories, a transformation now long completed. Mejchar has retained to this day her keen interest in “what people get up to”, her eye for the small and not-so-small relics they leave behind in their (urban) setting, creating a comprehensive photographic work of Vienna’s suburban landscape: it is a documentary inventory, an aesthetic staging of the ephemeral or, as Elfriede Mejchar herself says, “a fairy-tale picture book that doesn’t say: ‘once upon a time there was’, but ‘there is’”. Elfriede Mejchar was born in 1924 and lives in Vienna; 1952-1984: photographer for the Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments; freelance work since the 1960s Lisa Wögenstein was born in 1971 and is a cultural scientist; since 2004, curator of the Art Dept. at the Wien Museum. Numerous exhibitions and publications.

Elfriede Mejchar, * 1924 in Vienna, Austria. † 2020