St. Marx Cemetery – Walter Bernhardt Vintage Prints from the 1970s Walter Bernhardt, born in Vienna in 1942, grew up in a petit bourgeois household with violin lessons and completed an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk. He eventually abandoned this career path, supported himself with odd jobs, and began teaching himself photography in 1972. Over the following years, he devoted himself intensively to photography as an artistic medium, particularly drawn to facets of Vienna that lay beyond public interest: courtyards, cemeteries, wall poetry, and other quiet places in the city. His photographic debut came with these "wall poems"—atmospheric images of graffiti, weathered plaster, and traces of time and human touch in Vienna's urban landscape. During his explorations of Vienna, he finally discovered St. Marx Cemetery, a place that captivated him completely. Critic Otto Breicha, who had followed Bernhardt's work since the 1970s, called him the "declared lyricist among Austrian photographers" and elsewhere described him as "the nostalgic among Austrian photographers of his generation"—a photographer drawn to derelict buildings, weathered surfaces, and the quiet traces of decay. St. Marx Cemetery provided the ideal setting. The only surviving municipal cemetery from Vienna's pre-March period, in use from 1784 to 1874, final resting place of Mozart and sewing machine inventor Madersperger, and thanks to Hans Pemmer's efforts, preserved as an extraordinary blend of burial ground and park, a kind of open-air museum of deteriorating monuments to the dead. Exhibitions and Recognition – Bernhardt's work gained attention from its inception: in 1974, Otto Breicha invited him to the exhibition series "Creative Photography in Austria," shown in Bregenz, Graz
