Elfriede Mejchar, the grande dame of Austrian photography, helped write the history of Austrian photography with her series of photo-documentary studies on the outskirts of Vienna in the 1960s. As a professional photographer for the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments she helped capture for posterity many of the country’s art treasures in specific regions of Austria, first and foremost Lower Austria, Upper Austria and Styria. At the same time, i.e. roughly between 1960 and 1990, she compiled a collection of landscape photographs, from the roadside as it were, as part of her travels, her Road Trips through Austria. They featured wild sculptures in the form of electricity pylons, scarecrows, car wrecks, and the dilapidated façades of houses. After numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs, an artist’s book entitled Road Trip has now been published for the first time. Elfriede Mejchar has once again embarked on a journey, this time through her personal photo archive, re-examining and shaping it into an impressive and visually stunning epic.

Elfriede Mejchar, * 1924 in Vienna, † 2020