Willmann is one of the key figures in Austrian photography. As an artist and as co-founder and long-time editor of Camera Austria, he played an important role in shaping the discourse around contemporary photography in Austria.

His work is based on a documentary impulse, but it does not remain within the conventions of neutral description. In Das Land, photographs from southern Styria show bodies, interiors, animals, food, landscapes, and social situations in a direct, often raw visual language. The images move between familiarity and estrangement, beauty and discomfort, rural life and its latent violence.

The Secession catalogue offers a concise insight into Willmann’s photographic language and its tension between observation and transformation. His images register the world with precision, yet they resist simple documentary readability. They are records of places and situations, but also constructions of atmosphere, colour, proximity, and affect.

Manfred Willmann was published by the Vienna Secession in 2003 on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition, which ran from 27 February to 27 April 2003. The publication accompanied a presentation of Willmann’s photographic cycles Das Land (1981–1993) and Oman (1997), bringing together two bodies of work that show the range of his photographic practice between rural everyday life, documentary observation, and a heightened, often unsettling visual intensity.