"untitled"

Glocknerstraße

C-print (analogue)

titled, dated, signed and numbered (ink) on verso

In spring 2001 Hanns Otte completed his series of photographs of the Margaritze reservoir below the Pasterze. The meltwater from the glacier is collected there and pumped into the large reservoirs of the Glockner-Kaprun power plant group. The Pasterze, the largest glacier in the Eastern Alps, has melted so far within thirty years that its former extent has remained as a trace in the terrain. Its disappearance makes global warming and its consequences ex negativo comprehensible. Photography makes it possible to measure the changes in the terrain, the retreat of the ice, which man can neither control nor stop, while at the same time he tries to at least channel the force of nature. For over a hundred years, the glacier has been documented and photographed, captured on film, as if it could be stopped in this way.
The photographs of the glacier are a continuation of the series "Mother Stone", which Hanns Otte started in 1993 from the Salzburg Tennengebirge in black and white. Since 2001, he has been taking photographs in colour, which makes it more clearly visible what his gaze is aiming at. The theme of the periphery also dominates this series, although one would not describe the mountains as such. The "Peri" in periphery does not only mean "around - around", but also "beyond - beyond". And it is precisely this crossing of the boundary between nature and human intervention, the fluctuating observation of what is built and what has grown, that Otte's work always aims at.
(Milena Greif, Eikon, No. 43/44-2003)