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C-print mounted on cardboard

You have to invest time and concentrate on Elfriede Mejchar's pictures. Then it becomes clear that she succeeds in doing what is one of the most difficult things in photography: namely depicting things in such a way that the supposed contradiction between a subjective view of an object and the object itself seems to be eliminated - through her completely unpretentious and self-evident way of creating images. This is only possible with long experience, a well-trained eye and virtuoso mastery of the technical possibilities. [...]
During her many years working for the Federal Monuments Office, Mejchar mainly photographed architecture and sculptures. After her retirement in 1984, she found a worthy substitute in the flowers she grew in her own garden, as she had always particularly enjoyed photographing sculptures.
She was most interested in tulips and amaryllis, which she took into the studio at just the right time studio to observe their reaction to light and warmth. The choice of angle of view on the object, the height of the eye point, is then just as crucial as in the photography of sculptures. [...]
Photography is therefore primarily the result of the photographer's point of view in relation to a three-dimensional object; finding the right point of view in space is his most important task. This depends on the choice of the right lens. Elfriede Mejchar works with a medium format camera and a 100mm lens for her flower pictures in order to avoid distortion. She usually photographs the flowers in their entirety, but sometimes she concentrates only on the inside, which allows her to play with sharpness and blurriness. For her ingenious use of light, she usually uses a backlit pane of frosted glass as a background or a light tent, which is also used when photographing cutlery or metal.
The majority of her photographs are very expressive color images, but in the early days she worked in black and white for cost reasons. In an effort to make "more" out of these prints, she began to tone them with sulphur or to enlarge them "crosswise", i.e. to process a slide like a normal negative enlargement, which creates an inverted and thus peculiar colorfulness. The flowers themselves were also "altered" and hung upside down to dry, for example, but only those amaryllis varieties whose petals become transparent are suitable for this.
Mejchar was never interested in the loveliness of the flowers, but rather in their "construction". She was not interested in imitating nature, but in looking behind the façade of beauty: "For me, flowers are like statues and the faces of saints. The shapes are somehow similar if you look closely. Flowers are also objects. I also wanted to own the flowers, just like the sculptures. I could take the flowers home with me, but not the sculptures."
(Fritz Simak, "Blumen als Ersatz", in: Elfriede Mejchar. Fotografie, Weitra 2014, p. 177ff)