Civil Operations

or the first time, this new book of photographs by Walter Niedermayr features a selection of pieces from different work complexes, granting an inside view of the artist´s attitude towards photography and reality. The work presented here comprises Niedermayr´s alpine sites, which gained him international fame, as well as his hospital and prison walks and photographs of motorway and building-site architecture.
Whether Walter Niedermayr takes pictures in the openness of a longing alpine landscape or in the tightly controlled, cramped conditions of a closed institution, the concrete topographical reference in the picture always evaporates. The works are characterized by a diffuse light illuminating spaces and colors. Stretched between the visible and invisible, series of spaces ranging from sober eeriness to poetic delimitation reveal themselves. The artist confronts the viewer with the expansive imagery of a photographic series without beginning or end, with the spatial effects on the beneficiaries and those affected. His photographs are of space viewed from lives as passengers and inmates.