The photographic book project “valleyward”, conceived as a poetic documentation, contains exclusively images of the Zillertal. Yet one will not be able to recognize any registered trademarks of that landscape like the Ahornspitze or Penken, no Berliner Hütte, no views of Mayrhofen, Hintertux or Zell am Ziller. With his contemporary, sober awareness, Mauracher shows the reality of today’s Zillertal as a cliché: a world of signs and images, standstill and emptiness, of masks and stage sets he refuses to criticize. Whoever will precisely read Mauracher’s photographs can find in them an image of momentary social state whose accidental background is the Zillertal: alienated recreation, exploited nature, a sentimental sense of history.