Austrian Photographer and Model Semotan Dies at 83
Semotan, the Austrian photographer and former model whose images moved fluidly between fashion, advertising, and art, has died at 83. Her sons, Ivo and August Kocherscheidt, announced the news on Instagram, and Austria’s public broadcaster ORF also reported it. Based in Vienna, New York, and Jennersdorf, Semotan built a career that made her one of the most distinctive visual voices to emerge from Austria in the late 20th century.
Born in Wels in 1941, Semotan studied fashion in Vienna before moving to Paris, where she worked as a model and began developing a serious interest in photography. After returning to Vienna in 1971, she turned that interest into a full-time practice. Her early breakthrough came in the mid-1970s with Palmers, the Austrian lingerie brand, for which she created provocative advertising images paired with the slogan “Trau dich doch” (“I dare you”). The campaign drew on art-historical references and helped signal a more permissive visual culture taking shape at the time.
She later worked on campaigns for Römerquelle, another Austrian brand, and became known as a portrait photographer with a sharp eye for the art world. Among those she photographed were Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Daniel Richter, and Martin Kippenberger, whom she had briefly married until his death in 1997. In the 1980s and 1990s, her work also appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, and i-D.
One of Semotan’s most enduring collaborations began in 1984 with the Austrian designer Helmut Lang and lasted nearly two decades. Their partnership helped define a cool, exacting visual language that bridged fashion and contemporary art. Semotan even walked in one of Lang’s runway shows at age 51, later telling Vogue that she felt “excited and nervous” about the reversal of roles.
Beyond her commercial and editorial work, Semotan taught at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the International Summer Academy in Salzburg. She also published a memoir in 2016 and was the subject of a documentary released in 2019. Her sons wrote in the Instagram announcement that she “led an extraordinary life” and created work that “seamlessly blended reality and fiction, dissolving the boundaries between art history, fashion, portraiture, and everyday life.”
