Josef Hoflehner was born in 1955 in Wels, Austria when the country was still under allied occupation.
He grew up in a family where the camera was used so rarely that as many as three Christmas
holidays would be captured on one roll of film. Although Austria could boast awesome mountains and
a great natural landscape, it had no coastlines, deserts or empty spaces where one could see the
horizon unimpaired. At the age of 20 Hoflehner purchased a camera and began to travel. An early
award for photography began to open doors professionally and his career has continued to develop
with amazing success.
The images of Josef Hoflehner are hauntingly beautiful. Each photograph achieves a
perfection of composition that seems to defy the possibility that it could ever be seen any other way.
Gripping in their ultimate solitude and the unexpected natural beauty they capture, Hoflehner's
photographs take his earthly subject matter to raise it to an almost mythical level, defining the essence
of the place. In these rare and elusive moments, the natural and the man made are brought together
in a poetic interplay of light and shadow, emptiness and structure. Through his images, we are moved
to a new level of observation and exposed to a world where the chance and an underlying natural
order coexist with our own built environment.
Josef Hoflehner is represented by leading photography art galleries worldwide, and his exquisite prints
are found in a constantly growing number of public, private and corporate collections around the
globe; notable corporate collections include Polo Ralph Lauren, AT&T, Gap/Banana Republic, Fidelity
Investments, Sprint Nextel, French banking giant Societe Generale, among others. Hoflehner exhibits
regularly in New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, London and other world cities. He was voted Nature
Photographer of the Year 2007 and is set to release the fourteenth monograph of his work in Fall
2012.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.
