SALZBURG.- »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 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, in 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 homeland is the starting point for his expeditions into the 'Totes Gebirge' [Dead Mountains] area. 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 color negative film up to 20×25cm in size. His precise image details expose the surfaces of rugged mountain formations in the Alpine karst landscape and alternate with atmospheric lake scenes in the play of light and changing seasons. It is not the pictorial trophies of the summit victory that interest the artist, but he demands a valid symbol from the image. The »dissected« surfaces of the landscape symbolize them as faces, as it were, on which traces of transience and aging are inscribed.

Conversely, Pammer's portraits can also be read as landscapes. Both artists understand the genre they are dealing with as a kind of metaphor. In addition to presenting their works in the classic form of murals, since 2013 Prammer and Schoiswohl have been working on transferring their photographic imagery to the printed page in the form of 3 handmade Artists' Books in very small editions. The fourth edition of »Totes Gebirge« is now the first publishing monograph designed by Christine Zmölnig (Sensomatic Vienna). The rhythmic alternation of glossy and matt paper and the interspersing of translucent paper reflect the materiality of the original artwork as a visual and tactile counterpart in the printed work. The book is accompanied by a literary essay by writer Sandra Gugić and a cultural-historical excursus by philosopher Stephen Zepke.

An edition of 20 copies of the book is available, each with a picture motif.