ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Heimat photography as a genre that encompassed activities of amateur movements and artists, constructing a highly enigmatic photographic image of rural landscapes. Presenting a typology of places and people, continually repeated and reprinted in photo publications and pictorialist exhibitions, they forged homogenous views, coded notions of belonging in ethnic terms, and tied them to the national landscape. While not intrinsically reactionary, the photographs that represented Heimat nonetheless formed landscapes of exclusivity in which the idealisation of the countryside was driven to new heights. Drawing comparisons between Austrian Heimat photography and the representation of its counterpart from Czechoslovakia in the Viennese press, the chapter argues that the genre was quickly set in dialogue with a much broader culture merging travel, tourism, ethnography, and documentation. It shows the legitimisation of a national homeland in popular culture and the presentation of individual photographers as masculine prototypes of artist-adventurers seeking to preserve and record ‘vanishing’ cultures.
