ESHPh Visits: Photographer Elfie Semotan' Studio

"ESHPh Visits" is our new event format, launched to connect ESHPh members with photographic artists and spaces in Vienna and/or beyond it.

Hosted by Executive President Hanin Hannouch, by facilitating direct dialogue between the medium’s practitioners and its dedicated enthusiasts, the event becomes a space to promote synergies within our cohort and to connect it more strongly to the city.

Join us for an exciting look behind the image, as we visit artist studios, analog darkrooms, private collections, etc. to forge connections, and memories, that go far beyond the frame.

Our first ESHPh visit is to photographer Elfie Semotan's studio where we will meet the artist, get to know her studio, team, and engage with her practice in a focused environment.

Spots are limited and are offered following the "first come first served" principle.

Elfie Semotan discovered her passion for photography in Paris, where, after completing her training as a fashion designer, she worked as a photo model until the late 1960s. In 1969 she returned to Vienna and began her career as a photographer. By the mid-1970s she had become renowned for her style-defining advertising campaigns for Römerquelle [mineral water] and her billboard series for Palmers [lingerie]. At about this same time she met the painter Kurt Kocherscheidt, to whom she was married from 1973 until his premature death in 1992. Since 1985 Semotan’s fashion and portrait photographs have appeared in international magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Marie Claire. In 1994 her flourishing career took her to New York, where she continued a collaboration with the Austrian fashion designer Helmut Lang that had begun in 1986 and mounted a number of her own exhibitions. It was through Michel Würthle that Semotan met the artist Martin Kippenberger, to whom she was married from 1996 to 1997. Since the mid-1990s she has divided her time between Vienna, New York, and Jennersdorf/Burgenland, and is active not only as an award-winning photographer but also as a guest professor at educational institutions such as Vienna’s University of Applied Arts. In recent years her landscape, fashion, and nude photographs as well as her portraits and still lifes have been featured with increasing frequency in international exhibitions and artists’ books.

Spots are limited and are offered following the "first come first served" principle.
Visit our website: http://www.eshph.org/

The ESHPh warmly thanks Elfie Semotan and her team for their kind generosity towards our members.

Elfie Semotan, Selbstportrait, New York, 1997. Courtesy of the Artist.

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Host or Publisher European Society for the History of Photography