Unique mountain photography with history

Dating back all the way to the year 1900, the Heimhuber family’s historic photographs are visual testimony of times gone by, of the popular image of the mountains and the change it has gone through over the course of the years. As part of a special project in Stuben am Arlberg they are now made accessible to a broader public for the first time.

Mountain photography is closely connected to the emerging alpine tourism. The photographs from the beginnings of alpine tourism found a new target group in hikers and all those interested in the Alps; in many cases they were even taken according to their wishes. The passionate photographer, avid mountaineer, and fan of winter sports, Eugen Heimhuber, was a pioneer in this area. He didn’t just take pictures for his buyers though, in hundreds of thousands of photographs he also documented his deep, traditional roots in the mountains as well as this peculiar region.

The results include impressive mountain and lanscape photographs of the regions around Arlberg, Flexen, and Hochtannberg Pass which he usually took during his mountain and ski tours. They date back to the time before WWI and the interwar period. A historic treasure, which, because of its topic and dimension, was particularly suitable for the funded interreg-project – the creation of a virtual historic forum with aspects of winter sports in the respective regions. The association Foundation Friends of Hannes Schneider has tackled the editing of the Heimhuber family’s photographs in this context.

Open-air exhibition in Stuben am Arlberg

The open-air exhibition with motifs from the Heimhuber collection opens just in time for the start of the winter season. Large-format pictures with illustrative information and matching literary quotes invite all those who are interested to dive into the 140-year history of the entire village. In Warth and Hochkrumbach the motifs from the Heimhuber archive create the ideal framework for making the development of the villages over the course of the past century visible. On the initiative of the Foundation Friends of Hannes Schneider the coming weeks will also see the publication of a picture book titled “Sichtbar” (=visible) by Lorenzi publishers, which contains photographs taken by mountaineer and landscape photographer Eugen Heimhuber between 1900 and 1930. The motifs range from Stuben am Arlberg to St. Anton, Zürs and Lech, all the way to Warth. And they contain interesting pictures of the roads across Flexen and Arlberg Pass. The picture book will be published at the end of February, a presentation will take place in Stuben am Arlberg in March.