With the publication of Die Bleichen Berge in 1993, the South Tyrolean photographer became internationally known. The title referred to a Ladin Dolomite Saga, but it also fitted in with Niedermayr’s method of making the mountain panoramas look particularly pale and unreal by systematically under-exposing them during development.

The photographs show, for example, high alpine, leisure-time landscapes and all their paradoxes. They lead to sensitive zones where uncultivated land and civilisatio,; being alone and touristic tumult, come into hybrid contact. “Living spaces today are like department stores, set up to be gone through, reachable and connected” (Franz Xaver Baier). Wherever one looks, one recognises homogenising structures. All the civilised additions indispensable to the infrastructure of exposed cultural landscapes are registered with sober precision – ski lifts, avalanche-protection fences, pipelines etc. Although the pictures give the impression of ecological strain in high alpine terrain, the sober land surveyor Niedermayr is in no way a moralist. He finds beauty in maltreated consumer landscapes.

It concerns alpine photography without the inherent heroism and monumentality of the genre. Small shifts of perspective produce multi-part works that overlap at the edges. The individual image is made relative, the activity within it, stretched. The spectacular becomes an ornament and seems strangely entranced. The cause is Niedermayr’s intention to break the cult of the individual picture in order to suspend the commonplace of photography as a snapshot.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)