Elfie Semotan, an Austrian fashion photographer known for her collaboration with designer Helmut Lang, died “unexpectedly” on Saturday at 84 years old in Jennersdorf, a town in southeast Austria, according to an obituary posted on Instagram and a report by Austria’s national public broadcasting network ORF.
Semotan was based in Vienna, New York, and Jennersdorf, which is near the border with Slovenia and Hungary. She had spent time there since first buying a farmhouse in the area in the mid-1970s.
Semotan was born in 1941 in Wels, and studied fashion in Vienna. Soon after finishing her studies, she moved to Paris and worked as a model while developing her interest in photography. After moving back to Vienna in 1971, Semotan’s photography career began in earnest.
One of her first major assignments was in the mid-’70s with the Austrian lingerie brand Palmers. The advertising campaign paired Semotan’s provocative photos—many of which referenced art historical images—with the slogan “Trau dich doch” (“I dare you”). The photos “[bore] witness to a new, hedonistic zeitgeist that was gradually challenging conventions through playful experimentation,” according to an essay accompanying a 2019 show of Semotan’s work at C/O Berlin, a photography-focused exhibition space. She also worked on well-known ad campaigns with Römerquelle, an Austrian mineral water brand.
In addition to her advertising work, Semotan worked as a portrait photographer, shooting art world figures like Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Daniel Richter, and Martin Kippenberger (to whom she was briefly married, until his death 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 fashion designer Helmut Lang began in 1984 and lasted almost two decades. She even walked the runway in one of his shows when she was 51, telling Vogue that she was “excited and nervous” about the role-reversal of being in front of, rather than behind, the camera.
Semotan held teaching positions at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and at the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, and has won many art prizes. She published a memoir in 2016 and was the subject of a documentary film released in 2019.
She is survived by her older sister Irene Semotan and her sons, Ivo and August Kocherscheidt. Their mother, they wrote in the Instagram post announcing her death, “led an extraordinary life” and spent her long and varied career creating work that “seamlessly blended reality and fiction, dissolving the boundaries between art history, fashion, portraiture, and everyday life.”
