1943 – September 2003, was an Austrian photographer. Born in Buenos Aires to Gustav Glück and Elisabeth Mathilde Porges, she came to Europe with her family in 1945 after her parents had fled Austria in 1938. She grew up in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main, attended a photography school near Frankfurt, and later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. While studying, she was already working as a photographer for magazines in Munich and London. In the late 1960s she moved to Vienna and became closely connected with its artistic scene.

From 1968 onward, she was associated with the Vienna Group, Otto Muehl, Otto Breicha, and the artists' group Wirklichkeiten. She documented actions by Muehl and photographed numerous figures from Vienna's artistic and literary circles, including Arnulf Rainer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Hermann Nitsch, Elfriede Gerstl, Ernst Jandl, Martha Jungwirth, and Franz Ringel. Her photographs were made exclusively in black and white, and she became an important photographic documentarian of key phases of Viennese Actionism.

From the 1970s, her work increasingly concentrated on representations of people and incorporated conceptual and staged approaches. Her erweiterte portraits (extended portraits) combined several images of a person into multipart works, bringing conceptual methods into her portrait photography. Publications include Martha Jungwirth / Franz Ringel. Photographiert von Cora Pongracz (1972), 8 erweiterte portraits (1974), and Cora Pongracz – Fotografie (2001).

She remained artistically active until her death in Vienna in 2003. Her archive was transferred to Fotohof in Salzburg during the 1990s for conservation; in 2015, OstLicht acquired her complete estate, comprising around 42,000 negatives and 1,100 original prints.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved 7 September 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cora_Pongracz