from July 3, 2025

BORN IN WELS / UPPER AUSTRIA IN 1941, discovered her passion for photography in Paris, where, after completing her training as a fashion designer, she worked as a photo model until the late 1960s. In 1969 she returned to Vienna and began her career as a photographer. By the mid-1970s she had become renowned for her style-defining advertising campaigns for Römerquelle [mineral water] and her billboard series for Palmers [lingerie]. At about this same time she met the painter Kurt Kocherscheidt, to whom she was married from 1973 until his premature death in 1992.

Since 1985 Semotan’s fashion and portrait photographs have appeared in international magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Marie Claire. In 1994 her flourishing career took her to New York, where she continued a collaboration with the Austrian fashion designer Helmut Lang that had begun in 1986 and mounted a number of her own exhibitions. It was through Michel Würthle that Semotan met the artist Martin Kippenberger, to whom she was married from 1996 to 1997.

Since the mid-1990s she has divided her time between Vienna, New York, and Jennersdorf/Burgenland, and is active not only as an award-winning photographer but also as a guest professor at educational institutions such as Vienna’s University of Applied Arts. In recent years her landscape, fashion, and nude photographs as well as her portraits and still lifes have been featured with increasing frequency in international exhibitions and artists’ books.