Austria | Black and White
It tends to be hard to identify the noteworthy in what you know all your life. For ages I was convinced I had to go to far away places to find interesting photographs to capture. Of course nothing is farther from the truth. The task is to find the extraordinary within the ordinary and learn to see your environment with the eyes of a stranger. Luckily I started to understand that gradually and try to calibrate my seeing to that effect ever since.
Lower Austria
Semmering | Lower Austria
In 1854 the Semmeringbahn, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, then Europe’s first normal gauge mountain railway line, was opened to great acclaim and was regarded as a milestone in railway engineering. It connected the Semmering Pass and the eponymous mountain village in its picturesque surroundings to Vienna. The new line rendered it possible to reach Semmering in two hours by express train and turned it into a favoured Sommerfrische (summer holiday) retreat for Vienna’s aristocracy, gentry, and artistry of the time of the Fin de Siècle.
Tales of Past Glory
Although that times are long gone today, one can still marvel at the magnificent villas Vienna’s foremost architects built here along the serpentine mountain roads for their clients. The Hotel Panhans – said to have been Europe’s largest hotel once – and the Südbahnhotel bear evidence to the splendour the village once was home to. One can still enjoy the romantic panorama of the eastern Northern Limestone Alps, take walks and hikes and revel in the beauty of nature as long as one can cancel out the regular roar of motorbikes dashing over the pass road.
Graz | Styria
Timelkam | Upper Austria
The place where I come from. The very core of the problem of finding the noteworthy in what you know all your life. Happy to say I have solved the bugger somehow by now and enjoy snapping away when there now and then.
Klagenfurt am Wörthersee | Upper Austria
Greifenstein Power Station | Lower Austria
