After training as a fashion designer, Elfie Semotan, the grande dame of Austrian photography, worked as a model for many years before she moved behind the camera in the late 1960s and achieved international fame with her lyrical fashion photography. Semotan's photographs consistently display her engagement with art history and her contemporaneous art world. The boundaries between commercial photography and art photography are porous in her work. Her photographs of nudes, street scenes in New York and her "throwaway" photographs, which verge on the abstract, show that Semotan is far more than a classic fashion photographer.
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