“Totes Gebirge” is to be understood as a long-term artistic project by Agnes Prammer and Johann Schoiswohl, which also deals with dying and mourning by bringing together two independent photographic styles. In their conception of landscape and portrait, both are united by their insistence on consciously slowing down the photographic depiction process as an artistic credo.
Agnes Prammer, a visual artist and media educator in Vienna, opts for the collodion wet-plate process, which dates back to the early days of photography, for her portrait works. In this process, a glass plate is prepared with a light-sensitive layer before exposure in a mobile darkroom so that it can be developed while still wet after exposure. The optically faithful, almost petrified-looking portrait studies – the long exposure times demand maximum concentration from the subject – are accompanied by mechanical and chemical traces in the form of scratches and blind spots caused by the fragile process. These random inscriptions, which also partially obscure the people depicted, evoke a feeling of a “memento mori” (Susan Sonntag) or even a kind of “embalming” (Roland Barthes) through their supposed patina. This is in keeping with the artist’s aesthetic pictorial concept of not showing the sitters exclusively as individuals, but rather as models and placeholders for others.
For Johann Schoiswohl, a visual artist in Vienna and owner of a small farm in the Almtal valley in Upper Austria, his ancestral home is the starting point for his expeditions into the Totes Gebirge mountains. As he puts it in his own words, he is interested in places of remembrance. “In the photos of familiar places and views, which for me are also associated with thoughts of death and loss, my image of the Totes Gebirge emerges.” (Schoiswohl)
Since 2010, he has created numerous images using an analog medium and large format camera with up to 20x25cm color negative film. His precise image details expose the surfaces of jagged mountain formations in the alpine karst landscape and alternate with atmospheric seascapes in the play of light and changing seasons. The “dissected” surfaces of the landscape symbolize it as faces, as it were, on which traces of transience and aging are inscribed. And conversely, Prammer’s portraits can also be read as landscapes. This is because both artists understand the genre they are dealing with as a kind of metaphor.

Agnes Prammer, *1984 in Vienna; lives and works in Vienna.
Johann Schoiswohl, *1979 in Wels, Austria; lives and works in Vienna.