Willy Puchner

Willy Puchner (born 15 March 1952 in Mistelbach an der Zaya, Lower Austria) is an Austrian photographer, artist, painter and author who has worked mainly in Vienna since the late 1970s. Although he is also described as a painter, his name is chiefly associated with photography, which has occupied most of his career.

He grew up in Mistelbach and moved to Vienna in 1967 to study photography at the Höhere Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. He completed his studies in 1974 and taught there briefly. From 1978 he has worked as a freelance photographer and writer in the city. He later studied philosophy and sociology and earned a master's degree in philosophy, although the institution that awarded it is unknown. During the 1980s he gave many lectures on private photography at universities, museums and galleries. Since 1989 he has written regularly for the Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung.

One of his best-known projects is the children's picture book Penguins – Traveling the World, for which he took a pair of penguin statues, Joe and Sally, to places including the sea, the desert, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Cairo, and photographed them there. Another important body of work consists of portraits of elderly people, such as At the Age of 90, At the Age of 100 and Love at High Age. Overall he has held more than thirty exhibitions and produced more than twenty printed projects, with editions in English and German.

His exhibitions include the Museum Moderner Kunst and the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1980, the Austrian Museum of Photography in Bad Ischl in 1984 and the Steirischer Herbst in Graz in 1992. From the twenty-first century, his notable shows include On the Road at Home (2001) and Stopover New York (2005), both at the Atrium ed Arte gallery in Vienna. His work, focused on everyday life and old age, has reached international audiences through exhibitions and bilingual editions.