Elfie Semotan, Austrian Trend Photographer, Dies at 84

Elfie Semotan, an Austrian vogue photographer identified for her collaboration with designer Helmut Lang, died “unexpectedly” on Saturday at 84 years outdated in Jennersdorf, a city in southeast Austria, in accordance with an obituary posted on Instagram and a report by Austria’s nationwide public broadcasting community ORF.

Semotan was primarily based in Vienna, New York, and Jennersdorf, which is close to the border with Slovenia and Hungary. She had hung out there since first shopping for a farmhouse within the space within the mid-Nineteen Seventies.

Semotan was born in 1941 in Wels, and studied vogue in Vienna. Soon after ending her research, she moved to Paris and labored as a mannequin whereas growing her curiosity in images. After transferring again to Vienna in 1971, Semotan’s images profession started in earnest.

One of her first main assignments was within the mid-’70s with the Austrian lingerie model Palmers. The promoting marketing campaign paired Semotan’s provocative pictures—lots of which referenced artwork historic photos—with the slogan “Trau dich doch” (“I dare you”). The pictures “[bore] witness to a new, hedonistic zeitgeist that was gradually challenging conventions through playful experimentation,” in accordance with an essay accompanying a 2019 show of Semotan’s work at C/O Berlin, a photography-focused exhibition area. She additionally labored on well-known advert campaigns with Römerquelle, an Austrian mineral water model.

In addition to her promoting work, Semotan labored as a portrait photographer, capturing artwork world figures like Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Daniel Richter, and Martin Kippenberger (to whom she was briefly married, till his loss of life in 1997). In the ’80s and ‘90s, Semotan worked with a wide range of fashion and literary magazines like the New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, and i-D.

Semotan’s long-running collaboration with the Austrian designer Helmut Lang started in 1984 and lasted virtually twenty years. She even walked the runway in certainly one of his exhibits when she was 51, telling Vogue that she was “excited and nervous” in regards to the role-reversal of being in entrance of, reasonably than behind, the digicam.  

Semotan held educating positions on the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and on the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, and has received many artwork prizes. She printed a memoir in 2016 and was the topic of a documentary movie launched in 2019.

She is survived by her older sister Irene Semotan and her sons, Ivo and August Kocherscheidt. Their mom, they wrote within the Instagram submit saying her loss of life, “led an extraordinary life” and spent her lengthy and diversified profession creating work that “seamlessly blended reality and fiction, dissolving the boundaries between art history, fashion, portraiture, and everyday life.”