Projects

40 Grad in Wien

Simmering, Vienna · Summer 2026 · 4 photographs

In the summer, at 40 degrees, I asked myself: What does the city look like? What do people do about the heat? And who has to be outside?

Summer 2026 was the hottest in 260 years of records. From June to August, an estimated 995 people in Austria died from the heat. For the first time, Vienna reached 40 degrees. It happened on four days.

I took these pictures in Simmering, my home district. The heat is invisible. Its imprints are not: scorched grass, concrete without a patch of shade.

The streets were empty and silent. Nobody was out unless they really had to be. Nature needs time to recover. Until the next summer like this one.

Dozens of overlapping shoe prints in the dry earth of a footpath, scorched grass and a few green weeds along its edges.

A woman pushes a wheeled walker along a path between a pink and a pale blue housing block, a tree and dry bare ground in the foreground.

Two open parasols on a balcony of a beige housing block, above a passageway that leads through to trees and a path in the sun.

A man in a striped shirt and shorts, seen from behind with his head out of frame, stands at the kerb of a wide sunlit crossing, the long shadow of a push-button pole across the pavement.

Exhibition

Shown as four prints at PULS 2026, a group exhibition by westwaerts_ at Garage Grande, Vienna, 14 to 17 October 2026. Direct print on aluminium composite panel, 30 × 45 cm each, unframed.

Figures: ORF, 31 August and 2 October 2026.