Wiener Typen

A lawyer by profession, Emil Mayer was an avid photographer and a master of the complicated bromoil printing process. He is best known for his extended series of candid portraits of the various social types who populated the streets of Vienna in the early twentieth century: street merchants, soldiers, policemen, market women, waiters, coachmen, and window shoppers.

Mayer's photographs document a short-lived period of stability and prosperity in Austria's history. The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig recalled this time in his autobiography: "Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. … Every family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for vacations and entertainment… In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order."