Niedermayr, Walter

Italian, b. 1952

BiographySince 1987, Walter Niedermayr has been documenting the transformation of ancient mountains into modern resorts worldwide. Photographing the traces of tourism on the landscape, Niedermayr registers the human influence—visiting skiers on its trails—as graphic elements, symbols of human influence on the land. Col Rodella Ciavaces is an early work from his Alpine Landscapes series, one in which the aesthetics of the sublime, now reduced to clichéd idealizations of nature, are governed by the laws of consumption.

Walter Niedermayr has shown work at numerous museums internationally, including Tate Modern, London; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; MOCA, Los Angeles; Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, among others. He participated in the 12th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition in 2010 and in MANIFESTA7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, in 2008. Niedermayr became a Professor of Photography in the Department of Design and Art at the University of Bolzano/Bozen in 2011.