Josef Hoflehner Austrian, b. 1955

Josef Hoflehner was born in 1955 in Wels, Austria when the country was still under allied occupation. He grew up in a family where the camera was used so rarely that as many as three Christmas holidays would be captured on one roll of film. Although Austria could boast awesome mountains and a great natural landscape, it had no coastlines, deserts or empty spaces where one could see the horizon unimpaired. At the age of 20 Hoflehner purchased a camera and began to travel. An early award for photography began to open doors professionally and his career has continued to develop with amazing success. In 2007 he was voted Nature Photographer of the Year, and named one of "Austria's 10 best Contemporary Artists" in 2014. His works are regularly exhibited in New York, LA, Paris, London and other cities worldwide.

 

The images of Josef Hoflehner are hauntingly beautiful. Each photograph achieves a perfection of composition that seems to defy the possibility that it could ever be seen any other way. Gripping in their ultimate solitude and the unexpected natural beauty they capture, Hoflehner's photographs take his earthly subject matter to raise it to an almost mythical level, defining the essence of the place. In these rare and elusive moments, the natural and the man made are brought together in a poetic interplay of light and shadow, emptiness and structure. Through his images, we are moved to a new level of observation and exposed to a world where chance and an underlying natural order coexist with our own built environment.