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Austrian Fashion Photographers

Great visual talents that support and complement the vivid Austrian fashion scene.
Austrian Fashion Photographers
  If we have, throughout the past few months and in a collaborative effort between AUSTRIANFASHION.NET and Shift magazine, repeatedly tried to familiarise our readers with the Austrian fashion universe, yet another aspect should be taken into account when taking stock of the creative impact of our local fashion scene. For the liveliest and most creative fashion scene will only become as visible and successful as the images that reflect and capture it allow it to be.

As a matter of course, the greatest fashion avantgarde cannot and indeed, will not come anywhere close to international renown if it must do without the backup of excellent local photographers and visual wizzards. So, to give you a very simple example, a fashion graduate fresh from university will hardly have the budget to pay an international star photographer for his or her first lookbook. For this reason, we considered it wise to continue our ongoing series of portraits from the Austrian fashion scene with a brief introduction to the work of seven outstanding fashion photographers who are based in Vienna and make an essential contribution to the fashion boom we've been witnessing in Austria in the past few years.

Michael Dürr

If perfect control of the body were to rank as a preliminary condition for a successful photographer's career, Michael Dürr could look ahead with the greatest confidence and ease. Before he started working behind the camera, his preferred territory were gymnastic apparatuses and a diving board. Luckily for Austrian fashionistas though, Michael converted to the world of photography – and already collaborated with international titles such as Brazilian Casa Vogue, self service and Purple Journal – in addition to most of our national magazines, such as the brandnew fashion & culture quarterly faq magazine . His latest congenial invention is the cinéma photographique – an ongoing series featuring projections of fashion photo sequences in interesting locations in Austria and abroad. Absolutely astounding!

Elisabeth Handl

The website of young photographer Elisabeth Handl has a rather witty address. "Fotosoesin" plays with a charming alteration of the German word for a female photographer, indicating that the person behind the camera need not always be taken all too seriously. After all, we're all just human, aren't we...? Elisabeth studied graphic design at Vienna's University of Applied Arts, one of the city's main creative pools and an important networking hub where different departments (fashion, painting, graphic design, media art) function side by side and enhance inspiring insights into other workfields. Ever since she finished her studies, Elisabeth has worked as a freelance photographer and graphic designer, contributing to many of the country's best glossy magazines (for example Diva and Wienerin magazines), while also pursuing a more conceptual, artistic direction of photography. Since very recently, she has extended her field of activities by co-founding a new collective of photographers and designers called XDesign, where she is in charge of book publications and other promising visual projects. Dying to see more!

Andreas Waldschütz

Even though he's just over thirty years of age, Andreas Waldschütz has already gathered life and work experience in a pretty impressive number of countries. After growing up in Vienna and arriving at the point where he found the Austrian capital a wee too small, he packed his bag and went off to explore new shores – Californian ones, too, as he set out to discover San Francisco where he was involved in a film production company. After two years in California, he came back to Europe and moved to Berlin, later London. But then he decided that he might as well make Vienna his homebase again where he now lives, even though he travels a lot and has started making himself a name with beautiful productions shot in very extravagant locations (Andreas is not really a great friend of studio photography): For example, I absolutely love his editorial shot in Villa Maund somewhere in a mountainous region in Western Austria and realised in collaboration with Georgian-born design shooting star George Bezhanishvili.

Irina Gavrich

Among Vienna's talents in fashion photography, Irina Gavrich is definitely a name worth remembering: Ucrainian-born Irina has made a quick ascent after graduating from Ortweinschule in Graz and worked for international magazine titles such as Vogue UK and Harper's Bazaar Russia. Apart from that, she is also a close friend and constant lookbook photographer for up-and-coming fashion designer Anna Aichinger, whose Alphagirl concept she supports with a convincing photographic language. Generally speaking, Irina confides in her talent to grasp the essence of a scene and to release the shutter in the very "moment décisif" (to quote an expression forged by Henri Cartier-Bresson) which her intuition allows her to detect.

Peter Garmusch

Had he found his luck in soccer (which he tried for some years, he told me), the world of fashion and art photography would have lost a great talent: Styrian-born photographer Peter Garmusch has been a regular contributor to various Vienna-based and international magazines for years and is represented by the Vienna-based MOMENTUM gallery, which specialises in contemporary photography. I was lucky enough to work for a magazine publishing house that counted Peter among its staff of associated photographers and still remember how I would be impatiently looking forward to receiving the images he sent us from creative hotspots all over the globe. So here we've got a fashion photographer with a mighty visual expressivity and a straigthforward take on even the trickiest topic. When the Austrian edition of flair Mondadori magazine decided to collaborate with local fashion photographers for the first time last year, Peter was part of the game – and scored an impressive goal with his editorial shot in a moon-like landscape. With his work, Peter succeeds in making you think about his images at the same time as you appreciate their beauty. And that's a rare thing.

Martin Stöbich

If you're into clear forms, shapes and colours, Martin Stöbich might be the right man for you. Not that he wouldn't mind photographing the almost too messy desk of fashion designer Anna Aichinger, or staging a pair of virtually too-old-to-be-true Converse sneakers in front of a potted plant (a philodendron about to exhale its last breath, apparently...). A great number of international assignments make him one of those hard-travelling photographers who you run a chance of bumping into in Buenos Aires as well as in Beirut. Hear hear, we say, as the Metropolitan Opera of New York is among his clients – as well as sportswear giant Puma. To round things off, Martin is familiar with many young talents from our local scene and has already collaborated with such rising talents as Wilfried Mayer and Ute Ploier.

Mark Glassner

The most interesting thing about photographer Mark Glassner may well be – at least that's what the fashion editor at the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard stated in a portrait published after Mark had won an important editorial award – the many professional facets he has accumulated over the years. His work spans fashion photography, video art and, surprisingly, even a period of medical studies. Possibly because of this wide field of interests, a recurring motif in his fashion photographs is an upsetting of the laws of gravity as well as the subtle incorporation of striking architectural structures. So with Mark's work, you don't always seem to be able to tell at once whether models are lying down, or leaning against something, or standing upright. A brilliant example of his work: the lookbook he photographed for the spring 2010 collection of menswear designer Ute Ploier.   

Text: Daniel Kalt from AUSTRIANFASHION.NET

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