Long before the war, the Sesto/Sextner Dolomites attracted the attention of painters, graphic artists and increasingly photographers in the course of alpine and tourist development. In particular, after the middle of the 19th century, the Three Peaks were the motif that was increasingly used in travel illustrations and on postcards and, after the first ascent of the Große Zinne in 1859, became probably the most popular set of peaks in the Dolomites region. This motif was spread throughout Europe. The classical northern view of the Three Peaks became the preferred view and, during the war, the battlements were charged with new meaning as an armoured, fortified position, and border between the Austrian Tyrol and Italy.1See Holzer, Die Bewaffnung des Auges.
Although only a sideshow of the war, the Dolomite front, promoted by the myth of mountain warfare, received greater media and pictorial attention than other areas.
Mountain motifs and panoramic landscapes already known to tourists served as a backdrop for military-heroic image propaganda and also had a long afterlife in the debates on remembrance following the war. Italian fascists used the war footage of the high mountain landscapes of the Dolomites and the Ortler Front as proof of victory over Austria and to legitimize the annexation of the border region of South Tyrol to Italy. They occupied the mountain landscape with memorials, Italian names of existing and new huts, such as the Locatelli Hut (formerly the Dreizinnenhütte), and new field and place names. For conservative Austrian and German historiography, as well as for popular science, literature and film of the interwar period, the Dolomites stood for the construction of the narrative of the heroic war in rock and ice, with clearly pathetic exaggeration, and became a symbol of both fortitude and loss.2On the selection and interpretation of war photographs in German and Austrian photo books of the interwar period, see Holzer, Den Krieg sehen, pp. 62-24.
During the war years, as in all war zones, photographic image production also increased enormously in terms of numbers and technology on the Dolomite front, which lasted from 1915-1917, and continued to develop. In addition to the professional photographs commissioned by the military mainly for reconnaissance, documentation and propaganda purposes and the press pictures, amateur photographs of soldiers and observers were produced.
The military and the media became increasingly closely linked and became part of widespread systematic propaganda. At the beginning of the war, painters and draughtsmen were still employed to document the front, such as the painters Albert and Rudolf Stolz of Bolzano/Bozen, who in 1915 moved with the Standschützenbataillon Bozen to the front above Riva on Lake Garda and made a diary of paintings, or the Milanese Lodovico Pogliaghi on the Italian front of the Three Peaks. Over the course of the war, photography became the most important medium for images and propaganda, displacing other pictorial documents.
The photographer was involved in the militaryorganization and logistics and had to follow their paths; regardless of this, he could not move alone due to the weight of the equipment.3Holzer, Den Krieg sehen.
Photographs of both the Italian and Austrian Sesto Dolomites can be found in national, local archives and private collections and have had largely the same function. On the one hand, these are panoramic and increasingly precise and technically advanced reconnaissance photographs taken from the air, from higher protected locations or with a remote camera, which, in contrast to the picturesque tourist or scientific mountain panoramas, served exclusively for military reconnaissance and armoring of the landscape, precise down to the smallest detail, and were often transferred to drawn maps with the enemy’s military infrastructures inscribed. On the other hand, from 1916 onwards, there were more and more staged and arranged pictures which, after selection and repeated censorship, found circulation in the illustrated press or were filed in the archives.
The large number of private soldiers’ photographs had no public function, but mainly showed comrades, accommodations and social scenes.
The surviving pictures depicted the mountain landscape, preferably in winter, with and without military infrastructures such as shelters, snow galleries, trenches, gun emplacements, searchlights and cable cars (the latter received special attention as a means of transport), and occasionally staged battle scenes. There were also photos of the everyday life of the soldiers in the barracks, eating fields, ceremonies, work assignments and interrogations of prisoners of war. Strikingly often, the camera had the same protected line of sight as the weapons from the trenches, the barriers, caves or from a great height. Real fights were not or hardly photographed.
The everyday wartime life of the civilian population on the home front in the valleys was of less interest, but the destruction of Sesto/Sexten, individual buildings in Dobbiaco/Toblach and Schluderbach was documented. Above all, the images of Sesto/Sexten, destroyed by Italian shelling, in which civilian casualties were also to be mourned with the ruins of the church, inns and farmhouses, can be found with clearly propagandistic intent in newspapers and even on postcards.
With few exceptions, the photographers remained mostly nameless and only became identified by name through more recent research.

Photographic documentation of war structures 2021-2022
In the summer of 2021/22, more than 100 years later, documentation of the remaining traces and infrastructures of the war on the Three Peaks plateau using drones by Arc-team, which was commissioned in the research project, take up the overview of reconnaissance photography and show, through digital multidimensional graphic conversion, the infrastructural upgrading of the landscape of both fronts in legible, marked panoramas – even deep spatial sequences and maps.4See the documentation by Arc-Team/Rupert Gietl and Gianluca Fondriest as part of the project "Written in the landscape. Places, traces, memories. The First World War in the Sesto Dolomites". This is a technical development that began with reconnaissance photography of the First World War, with its military decoding and redrawing. Italian and Austrian war panoramas and maps of the Sesto/Sextner Dolomites are exemplary for this at the beginning.

Anton Trixl and Hans Opfergeld. Two photographers at the Sesto Dolomites front
Anton Trixl (1878-1954) was drafted into the Landsturm in January 1915 and assigned to the building department. He was responsible for the construction of fortifications and the organization of supplies on the Austro-Hungarian front in the Dolomites. Initially deployed on the Carnic ridge and in the area of the Col di Lana, he took command of the Lanziger Säge entrenchment depot near Sesto/Sexten until the end of the war.5About Anton Trixl see Kofler and Wurzer, Sepp Innerkofler und die Entstehung eines Mythos, pp. 122-129. As an official war photographer, he documented the war infrastructure and the everyday life of soldiers on the Austro-Hungarian front. In August 1918, he directed and photographed the exhumation, transport and burial of the remains of Sepp Innerkofler, who had fallen on the Paternkofel in 1915, and thus made a significant contribution to the creation of the heroic myth surrounding Innerkofler and the Dolomite War. The iconic image of the funeral procession in front of the Three Peaks originates from him, where once again the landscape becomes a symbol of resistance against the Italian enemy coming from the south as well as Innerkofler’s sacrificial death.6Kofler, Wurzer, Sepp Innerkofler und die Entstehung eines Mythos, pp. 122-129.
Hans Opfergeld (Salzburg 1886 -1962), after his studies, worked as a photographer in several German cities, including Bremen. In the years 1916-1917, he spent at least one summer, one winter and the turn of the year in Bad Altprags, undertook excursions to the Dolomite front between Monte Piano, Prato Piazza, Schwalbenkofl, Three Peaks area, Schönleiten, Forame and into the Gemärk. He photographed war infrastructures such as camps, gun emplacements, trenches, cable cars, probably staged firings of howitzers and mortars far from the battlefields, as well as the destroyed buildings in Landro, Schluderbach and Neu-Toblach. In 1928, he opened a photo studio in Salzburg (Wolf-Dietrichstrasse), gave lectures on the Dolomite War and continued to deal with mountain photography. After his death, the studio was abandoned, the estate is lost. Unfortunately, no further biographical references have been found so far.
He is not known to have been a war or official press photographer for the Imperial and Royal War Press Quarters. However, the photographs of two photo albums in South Tyrol’s private possession suggest that he had an official commission. Otherwise, he would hardly have been so privileged, staying at a safe distance from the fighting in the officers’ quarters in Bad Old Prague and certainly supported by the respective commanders, taking numerous pictures of the front. Both albums are also marked “Dolomiten-Front 1916 – 1917. Taken by Hans Opfergeld from Bremen.” For the first time, the collection allows images of fronts and landscapes of unknown authorship to be attributed to him.7The photograph illustrated in Holzer 1996, p. 74, is not assigned to any author, also not in Casagranda, Rizzo 2010; however, it is clearly to be assigned to Hans Opfergeld being it identical to the photo entitled 'From Schwalbenjöchl gegen Drei Zinnen" in the album. The same applies to the picture in Holzer 1996, p. 76, which in the album is entitled "Artill. Beobachter Schwalbenalpenkopf gegen Drei Zinnen".
He documented both the infrastructures at the front, often with the same camera in summer and winter, with winter shots predominating and he photographed himself with the commanders against the backdrop of the Three Peaks and in snow tunnels – his moustache and a double crooked gamecock feather on the hat make him easily recognizable – as well as the stay of the commanders in whose circles he moved and was accommodated in the Bad Altprags. Convivial scenes, such as the New Year’s Eve celebration in 1916/17 or in meter-deep snow with officers, stand next to official group pictures. The quality of the numerous, also panoramic landscape photographs is high both technically and in the choice of images. Opfergeld focused on the landscape even without military infrastructures and created outstanding mountain photographs.
Apart from a few exceptions, the front shots are staged, well composed and not spontaneous images. One of the albums contains his photo portrait signed “Hans Opfergeld März 1917”. The prints are inscribed by hand and sometimes dated.