Born in Austria in the last years of the Nazi era, he came to Sweden in the 1960s and made friends with Swedish photographers. For a long period he was inspired by both American and Swedish artists, participated in group exhibitions and belonged to several constellations, before his Central European heritage manifested itself in the form of Czech inter-war art. From his Swedish outpost he was acknowledged in Austria and in 1985 he received the highly exclusive Rupertinum Fotopreis, an award given to an innovative photographer.
His photographs from later years spring from dreams and fragments of memories from the past, from his childhood. From the time when the Nazi ideology confronted those who had defended it but had to pay the price by losing limbs and body parts. When Otmar the child – his hair plastered down and severely parted – encountered these former soldiers, these victims of Nazism, who had blindly sacrificed their bodies and eventually been disappointed and lost their belief in the ruling race, their images were instantly etched into his mind.
Decades later, fragments from this past began to surface and demanded to be materialised, initially only as eerie shapes that were hard to trace back to their origins. Eventually, he could model a human-like shape in clay, which he then photographed in dim lighting, in the dusk where dream experiences blend with what is called reality.
The result was a unique series of pictures, impossible to repeat. They cannot be performed again, since the chemical compound of developer and toner fluid never blackens or colours a photo paper the same way twice. The images are made up of energetic patters – alternating between etched sharpness and dissolved elusiveness – but conveying an almost unbearable pain. Otmar’s pictures stand out, they are like no other photographer’s. And like no other photographs.
Leif Wigh
