"Wilder Kaiser"

pigmentbased inkjet print on watercolor paper

signed on recto, titled and numbered on verso

Might not other European landscapes – German heathlands, Croatian karst landscapes, the French Massif Central or the Italian Abruzzo – be much more suitable for “silent” photography? This particular part of the Tyrolean Alps, of all places, which holidaymakers or viewers would surely associate with spectacular rather than “silent” – the landscape around Kitzbühel?
Edward Weston, the legendary master of landscape photography in the American West, once remarked that good landscape motifs are always to be found wherever a good landscape photographer happens to be. And silent landscapes, one could continue, are always where there is a silent photographer.
Maria Schott, now a photographer with a great deal of experience and reputation, is a quiet, even silent photographer. Her subject is not the monumental, the spectacular, but the nuances, the allusions, the ambiguous – the poetic in the landscape. Viewers are not instructed or impressed – they are drawn into the landscapes as a metaphor for human moods and emotions.
Heinrich Riebesehl, German photographer and art professor, writes that for him, high-quality photographs have one thing in common: nothing, not a sound, can be heard in them. He calls this “magical silence”.
Maria Schott's photographs lend themselves to listening into this “magical silence”.
(Rupert Larl, Innsbruck 2004, translated by deepL)