Skip navigation

Category Archives: Photo

Photos that expose “The Other America”

Mitch Epstein, American Power, Plate-forme pétrolière “Ocean Warwick”, Dauphin Island, Alabama, 2005 / Ocean Warwick Oil Platform, Dauphin Island, Alabama, 2005, © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein. Courtesy Thomas Zander, Cologne

Article first published on 21 September 2011 by Swissinfo.ch: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/Photos_that_expose_The_Other_America.html?cid=31187806

In the wake of the 9/11 commemorations, three major contemporary American photographers present unfamiliar and intriguing images from the United States.

Emotion, power and nostalgia are the distinct themes presented in three parallel exhibitions under the collective title, “The Other America”, at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne.

By revealing the paradoxes of their homeland with images of sometimes brutal beauty, Frank Schramm, Saul Leiter and Mitch Epstein show us a different America.

The photographic language of the artists whose works fill Switzerland’s premier photography museum could not be further apart. But they share a sharp sobriety and elegance that challenges the divide between documentary photography and art.

“These three exhibitions encourage us to question our attitudes towards the US,” Elysée Director, Sam Stourdzé, said at the opening.

Frank Schramm, Stand-ups – Reporting Live from Ground Zero, 28 septembre, 2001 (#4) / September 28, 2001 (#4), ©Frank Schramm. Courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Reporting from Ground Zero

Frank Schramm was in New York on September 11, 2001. But rather than chronicle the event, he stepped back to portray those who were on the frontline of the news delivery. Over the following weeks, he photographed the TV presenters who provided the news in an endless loop.

Segregated in an area on the West River at some distance from the cordoned-off Ground Zero, they became the “stand-ups” reporting the live events that they themselves were not allowed to see.

“Photographing the journalists became my way of dealing with my own emotions,” Frank Schramm told swissinfo.ch. “In my emotions, I was wondering how they were dealing with theirs.”

The resulting portraits, many of which have the glossy perfection of a fashion shot, have never been shown publicly before this year. None carry any names, although many of the portrayed presenters are well known.

“This work is not about the journalists. It’s not about who they are. It’s about: can a tragic event bridge towards art,” Schramm observed.

Pauline Martin, who curated the show, explained that the journalists, as they became the mediators of a nation’s collective trauma, were also unwittingly contributing to the success of the terrorist act by amplifying the media coverage.

“The series serves as a manifesto: terrorism cannot exist without the major role played by the media and the images they broadcast,” she insisted. Press fortunes and careers are made overnight by disasters.

“Life goes on, we move forward. I wanted to remember what we were feeling,” Schramm recalled.

Frank Schramm, Stand-ups – Reporting Live from Ground Zero, 17 septembre, 2001 (#5) / September 17, 2001 (#5)

“American Power”

Under the provocative and ambiguous title, “American Power”, Mitch Epstein documents the massive reliance of the US on unlimited amounts of energy.

From 2003 to 2008, Epstein crisscrossed the country in search of the installations either in use, or abandoned, that have contributed to the “power of America”.

“He uses an artistic approach to tackle important social issues,” Stourdzé said of Epstein, whom he considers to be one of the most important photographers today.

“By looking at the larger American landscape and identifying the sites that produce energy, I watch the story between communities, corporations and the government unfold,” Epstein explained, adding, “This work is a reflection on American culture at this time.”

He said that he was not an environmental activist, but that he realised that America takes a lot for granted. “We were handed a lot and we expect a lot. This has created a sense of entitlement.”

Mitch Epstein, American Power, Barrage de Hoover et Lac Mead, Nevada/ Arizona, 2007 / Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, Nevada/ Arizona, 2007, © Black River Productions, Ltd./Mitch Epstein. Courtesy Thomas Zander, Cologne

Politics are the driving agenda, according to Epstein. Workers who have contributed to the might of the nation become renegades when the power plants are abandoned or relocated. He sets out to tell their stories too.

“My pictures are complex because I want to produce a metaphorical narrative of things American and compress as much as I can into a single image,” he said.

It is not without irony that his panorama includes images of lakes once used to cool off nuclear power plants and that have now become leisure areas, mostly for immigrant workers.

The 65 pictures of scarred landscapes have a stand-alone perfection that makes them almost abstract. We are looking at a country’s destructive reliance on energy, but at its optimism as well.

Photography is a language, Epstein stated. “It is my job to use that language in all its fluency.”

“Early Color”

Sam Stourdzé, who curated the third show in a theatrical display that occupies the entire third floor of his museum, presented the works of Saul Leiter, too aged to be present.

Leiter, born in 1923, first trained as a painter before exploring photography. He discovered “street photography” by visiting the exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson at MoMa in 1947 and from there on began to photograph his environment. But he was less interested in scenes, than in capturing fragments of scenes.Saul Leiter: Early Color, Taxi, 1957

“His early attempts in black and white were fairly ordinary, but when he switched to colour, his eye as a painter and a colourist took over,” Strourdzé explained. Images become compositions, each one the beginning of a story.

“Leiter plunges us into a nostalgic America of the Fifties,” Stourdzé explained. “He is sharing his solitary moments of reverie.”

It is precisely the poetic dimension of The Other America that allows a documentary exhibition to emerge as art. Stourdzé is convinced that “visual narratives can transform the way we look at things”.

This is the first time the pictures have been shown in Switzerland.

Saul Leiter: Early Color, Parade, 1954

Lust and Vice censored in Bern

Bruce Nauman, Vices and Virtues, 1983–1988/2008, Neon-Schrift (18-teilig), Courtesy of the artist and Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. Photo: Markus Mühlheim © 2010, ProLitteris, Zürich

A remarkable panorama on the portrayal of sin by artists over the last 11 centuries is being held at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Zentrum Paul Klee. But the last-minute removal of 3 works on the theme of lust and the decision to restrict access to under 16 year-olds sends worried ripples through the art world. The public flocks, but is it for art or titillation?

The exhibition ‘Lust and Vice, the 7 deadly sins from Dürer to Nauman’ until February 13 at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern has become a succès à scandale, precisely what it was seeking to avoid.

Coming hot on the trail of the much-disputed censorship of a retrospective in Paris of the American photographer Larry Clark, the last-minute removal of two pictures by the same artist from the exhibit has met with criticism, especially since one of the works is on the web anyway.

“There is definitely a before and after the Paris decision,” admits Juri Steiner, director of the Paul Klee Zentrum, where the section on lust is displayed.

He and his Kunstmuseum Bern counterpart, Matthias Frehner, made a last-minute joint decision to take out the two Larry Clark photographs, as well as an explicit watercolour of female genitalia by the German political expressionist George Grosz. They also established the age restriction rule.

In Paris, the popular Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë took the unprecedented decision to ban under 18 year-olds from seeing the Larry Clark photography retrospective Kiss the past hello at the Modern art museum.

For the past 50 years Clark has chronicled teenagers in situations of great vulnerability and sometimes distress as they discover lust and drugs. Google his name and you will understand.

“We decided to remove Clark’s photographs,” Steiner explains, “because we realized that they had the power to focalize attention at the cost of the 250 other works in the exhibition.”

Vice and Lust is the culmination of two and a half years of work by curators Fabienne Eggelhöfer (ZPK), Claudine Metzger (KMB) and Samuel Vitali (KMB).

The vivacious and spirited Fabienne Eggelhöfer takes time off to explain how the two major Bern institutions worked together to cover a theme that would be any curator’s dream.

“We have already collaborated together,” Eggelhöfer says, “but this is the first time we have worked on a theme,” adding that the combination  secured more significant loans.

“It has been interesting, if not always easy,” she develops, explaining that the three curators met together every week. Without any subject segmentation, they discussed their different perceptions of sin and come to an agreement on the choice of the art works.

 

Jealousy: Fernand Cormon, Jalousie au sérail, 1874, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon

The seven deadly sins, Fabienne Eggelhöfer explains, were defined as early as the late antiquity under the Egyptians to preserve the monastic vow of an intact relationship with God. This meant proscribing the sinful thoughts or behaviours that could get in the way.

These included pride, greed, envy, anger, laziness, gluttony and lust.

 

Lust: Sigmar Polke, Ohne Titel, 1973, Kunstmuseum Bern Sammlung Toni Gerber
Bern – Schenkung, 1983 © 2010, ProLitteris, Zürich

 

“The seven sins became a reoccurring theme throughout art history,” Eggelhöfer says, although it was sometimes difficult for the curators to decide to which category a work should be assigned.

Furthermore, she points out, values change. Greed is now cultivated by contemporary marketing strategies. We are constantly being invited to gain points, clock up miles, win a car.

 

Greed: Thomas Couture, La soif de l’or, 1844, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse

Lust is another case in point, she says, since the notion of lust being sinful was society’s attempt at limiting unwanted births and children without families. The advent of the pill in the 60s transformed the situation.

(Notice how it also ushered into art the male member in its erectile state. Various examples are on display.)

“When selecting the pieces to illustrate sin, we were careful to choose artists who had more than a single work to suit the themes,” Fabienne Eggelhöfer emphasizes, “and who showed an interest in the human condition.”

“I would be mistreating an oeuvre if I were to use it to illustrate my own ideas,” she says.

 

Sloth (laziness): Markus Muntean / Adi Rosenblum, Untitled (Everything was as it had…),
2001, Sammlung Dr. Fuchs, Wien

The three curators have succeeded in creating a harmonious ensemble that avoids a moralistic stance. “We don’t refer to homosexuality,” Eggelhöfer specifies, “because this is an exhibition on sin.”

When it came to distributing the works between the two museums, decisions came easily, she indicates.

The Kunstmuseum, with its smaller rooms was to receive the more spiritual pieces and cover the themes of pride, envy, greed and anger, whereas the Zentrum Paul Klee would expose the larger and more “carnal” works, while concentrating on lust, gluttony and sloth.

“But in some instances, we changed our minds at the last minute and transferred a selected piece from one category to another.”

Delightful fine-lined drawings by Klee are dispersed throughout, some of them decidedly naughty, others a lot of fun and they could belong anywhere.

 

Gluttony: Martin Parr, Luxury USA, Los Angeles, 2008, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zürich

The section on lust is divided into two sections, the one with works of more overt sexuality is sectioned off with the warning:

“Lust and Vice is not suitable for adolescents under the age of 16. Some of the works on display in the Zentrum Paul Klee may be considered as pornographic and might shock them and perhaps even you. The cultural value of these works justifies their protection.”

Would such a warning not have sufficed?

Bernard Fibicher, director of the cantonal fine arts museum in Lausanne, does not understand a decision that he qualifies as “irresponsible”.

“The organisation of an exhibition implies an internal mechanism of censorship,” he says. “At each stage, you have to ask yourself what are the risks and if you can stand by your choices.”

In 2005, Fibicher organised the controversial exhibition on contemporary Chinese art at the same Bern Kunstmuseum in which the head of a human foetus grafted onto a seagull’s body was exhibited to general outcry.

“You have to think things through before, not afterwards,” he argues.

“I also find it disturbing that self-censorship in Switzerland should be the result of something that is happening elsewhere,” Fibicher points out.

In recent interviews with the Financial Times and Le Monde, Larry Clark says of the censorship of his Paris show, “I think it’s just the stupidest thing in the world . . . it’s an attack on youth and on teenagers in general,” whom, he believes, receive the message that they should be swallowing garbage from the web instead of going to art museums.

Over 18 year-olds, he suggests, should be the ones barred from the exhibition.

 

Pride: Daniela Rossell, Untitled (Itati next to her pool), from the serie “Third World Blondes“
2001, Galleria Alberto Peola, Turin

“It is true,” Fabienne Eggelhöfer concedes, “that we would probably have done a different choice of works had we known.”

“But nevertheless, we had a great time putting it together,” she says, reminding us of the many prestigious works that can be admired until February 20, including by Marina Abramovic, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Albrecht Dürer, Fischli / Weiss, Gilbert & George,  Paul Klee, Bruce Nauman, Martin Parr, Sigmar Polke, Peter Paul Rubens, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Andy Warhol and many more.

Irving Penn as keen social observer at Lausanne Elysée


Benoîte Lab, Paris, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

American photographer Irving Penn, whose images of sculpted beauties transformed fashion photography in the 50s and 60s, also documented the ordinary throughout his career. “Small Trades” at the Lausanne Elysée Museum presents vintage prints of simple folk in their professional attire, revealing the deep cultural differences between London, Paris and New York where the pictures were taken.

Organized in collaboration with the Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum, the exhibition at the Elysée Museum in Lausanne is a rare example of art serving history.

The portraits made by Irving Penn between fashion shots for Vogue magazine in the middle of the last century capture the essence of a large scope of proletarian professions, many of which were soon to disappear.

The prestigious Elysée museum in Lausanne has selected 106 vintage prints from the large collection of ‘Small Trades’ by Irving Penn owned by the Getty museum and presents them not in chronological order, but by trade such as the chimney sweeps, shoemakers, delivery men or butchers of Paris, London and New York.

“I have seen these photographs any number of times,” says Virginia Heckert, associate curator of the Getty Museum, “but this exhibition makes me appreciate them all over again.”

In hues of silvery gray, people stand upright in their professional dignity against the walls of the stately mansion of the Elysée that have been painted over in a contrasting and enhancing powder pink for the occasion.

Irving Penn (1917-2009) first trained as an artist and graphic designer before being encouraged by the legendary art director of Vogue, Alexander Liberman, to make the photographs himself of the covers he had designed. His elegant hallmark compositions carved the pages into geometrical patterns.


Inving Penn’s British Vogue cover for June 1950 (not in exhibition), source www.vogue.co.uk

He was also known to coax the personalities of his sitters into the frame, from models Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish beauty with the 17-inch waist who was to become his wife, to Gisele Bundchen, as well the cultural icons Alberto Giacometti, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso and Harold Pinter, amongst many others.

The show in Lausanne reveals another side to Penn which Sam Stourdzé, the Elysée’s director, acknowledges will be a discovery to many.

Stourdzé says that Small trades is an equally important part of Penn’s work. He has programmed the exhibition at the same time as one dedicated to Bernd and Hilla Becher who transformed architectural photography with their careful documentation of the vestiges of the industrial revolution, but of buildings, not of people.

“We are launching the season on the theme of the history of photography,” he says.

Small trades offers insight into the organisation of society in the 50s, highlighting the differences between the professions in Paris, London and New York. It also gives an amusing vantage point to national characteristics.

“You get a sense of the unique character of the trades in each of the cities,” Heckert points out, adding that a guessing game to determine the origin of the person pictured can be played.

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: House painters, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: Firefighters, 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation

“People in Paris were suspicious and would tend to hide behind their tools to gain confidence,” she explains.

Edmonde Charles-Roux, a young French intellectual and future editor of Vogue France, was assigned to assist Penn in Paris.

She employed the yet unknown Robert Doisneau, as well as the poet, Robert Giraud, better known for his alcohol consumption than for his verse, to “pick” people off the streets for the photo sessions.

It was Giraud who included the contortionists, muscle-builders, cabaret singers (see Benoîte Lab above) and nude models “extending the scope to include the unexpected,” Penn later explained.

Charles-Roux describes in an interview how the sitters at first could not understand why this American would be interested in them.

“But after a week’s work, they suddenly came out of there touched to the quick. All at once they realized that someone was interested in them, in their uniforms, their way of life.”

The British, on the other hand, explains Hackert, would arrive promptly at the sittings impeccably dressed and proud to represent their trades. They had a “formulaic” way of posing, she adds, adopting attitudes expected of their professions.

The most unpredictable were the Americans, she indicates. Because they were being photographed by a “famous photographer”, they were convinced “that they were on the way to Hollywood” and would arrive not in their trades clothes, but in their Sunday best.

While Penn was documenting the archetypes of disappearing trades, he was also recording what he describes as “individuality and occupational pride”, which he believed was “on the wane”.

He was showing, as Heckert, points out, that these “people had a role to play in life”.

Penn chose to extract his sitters from their own environments, as opposed to August Sanders or Eugene Atget, who had inspired him, but who pictured occupations within their context.

He employed the same make-shift studios and half-painted backdrops that he used for fashion goddesses and celebrities to document the men and women in their work apparel or uniforms, holding the tools of their trades. He only worked in natural light coming from the side in order to obtain crispness in the details.

Irving Penn’s makeshift studio as pictured in the Lausanne exhibition

“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them,” Penn explained.

By the mid-60s, Penn decided that a photo on a printed page was “something of a dead end” and became disenchanted with fashion magazines.

He then turned to “the area of manipulation, of control, breakdown, and the reconstruction of the image” by adopting the platinum process of making photographic prints, instead of the classical gelatine silver process.

In the platinum process, the paper first absorbs the light-sensitive emulsion of platinum and palladium salts, before being exposed to a real-size negative under Xenon light. Small trades was one of the first series that Penn revisited to make new prints.

The result, Stourdzé points out, is a higher degree of detail, as well as greater warmth and voluptuousness in the flesh tones. Viewers can appreciate the difference by comparing several prints in both techniques side by side.

“What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials,” Alexander Liberman, the Vogue art director said of his protégé. The exhibition in Lausanne is an opportunity to understand what he meant.

Irving Penn ‘Small Trades’ in Lausanne: Chair caner, Paris 1950 @ The Irving Penn Foundation, photo in situ Laird

Vevey lives up to its ‘Images’

Li Wei, ‘Levels of freedom’, one of the highlights of Vevey ‘Images’ posted on a gigantic bill board opposite the train station

Branded “City of images”, Vevey lives up to its reputation. “Images” is a free visual arts festival that invades the lakeside city every two years. A myriad of international artists contribute to an ambitious programme that runs indoors and outdoors until September 26, featuring works by cult American film director David Lynch and by French art activist JR, whose monumental frescoes speak louder than words.

When Stefano Stoll, head of the cultural department of Vevey became director in 2008 of Images, an event created in 1995, it was a a biennial attended mainly by photography professionals.

He tells Swisster how he decided to transform it into an open-air festival of the visual arts for the public at large. “I don’t generally like open-air exhibitions,” he admits, “because they are often disconnected from their environment.”

“So we decided to take another approach. In our festival, each image has been carefully chosen in relation to a specific part of the urban and lakeside environment of Vevey,” Stoll says, adding that only then can it resonate with the setting and become meaningful. His hope is that even the artists will look at their works differently.

Stefano Stoll, Director of ‘Images’ festival and head of Vevey culture department, 3 September 2010 photo  Laird

This year’s edition is spread out amongst 30 different venues, all within a distance of less than a kilometer. Like a treasure hunt for adults and children, startling discoveries are to be made at the different street corners of Vevey.

“To find the right fit between 45 artists and a particular spot in an urban environment is what takes a long time,” Stoll explains.

When a choice is finalized with the artist, a technical team comprising of a full-time photo-lithographer, two graphic designers and eight technicians steps in. It takes several months to deck out the city with a site-specific display that does not shy away from complexity.

During the final stages of mounting, more than 20 people are at work, not to mention the communication and project managers. “I have a dream team this year,” Stoll recognizes.

Monumental pictures larger than Broadway billboards rub elbows with delicate photographic friezes dotted along the streets. Two examples give an idea of the contrasts obtained:

The work of Chinese artist Li Wei from his series “29 levels of freedom” drapes over the entire facade of the BCV on the Grande Place, arresting the busy train passengers pouring out of the station, while a triptych on the theme of “Love at the high place” adorns the empty spaces of the covered market on Place de la Grenette.

Li Wei, whose improbable pictures of flying individuals are real, obtained with pullies and mirrors, not Photoshop, gave a spectacular performance for the opening of “Images” during which he climbed onto the fork sculpture in the lake off Vevey and stood upside down at its summit.

Li Wei ‘Love at the high place’ at Grenette (partial view)

Li Wei stands upside down on fork sculpture, Vevey, Lake Geneva, 5 September 2010 © Céline Michel

Jean-Christian Bourcart requires a more intimate environment. The pictures he shot at weddings to earn his living before he left France wrap around the lovely Eglise Saint Claire, whereas his series “Camden”, his stark portraiture of violence in the US, where he has been living since 1997, find refuge in Théâtre de Vevey.

 

Jean Christian Bourcart, ‘The most beautiful day of my life’, (Paris, 1980 – ongoing) at Eglise Saint Claire

Jean Christian Bourcart ‘Camden’ at Vevey Theatre

Stoll stresses how “Images” is the result of an intense collaboration between local cultural institutions and galleries, with the generous support of the city of Vevey and sponsors, including home-based Nestlé.

It also celebrates the seventh Vevey International Grand prix of photography (that received over 1,000 submissions from five continents this year) and the fifth European Grand prix of first films, both of which have rewarded young talents that have since made a name for themselves.

The ‘Images’ programme this year includes a David Lynch film retrospective, that partners an exhibition organized by the Vevey Jenisch Museum of his equally disturbing art work entitled David Lynch. I hold you tight.

David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

The headquarters of the festival, complete with welcoming centre, boutique and bookshop, are housed in the former EPA department store that was ripped of its fixtures before refurbishment. The place in its present state is magical.

The four floors have become an ephemeral museum with 15 exhibitions, including the world-famous Carola et Günther Ketterer-Ertle video art collection.

An annexe to the festival, but one that stays open all year is Quai No. 1, the gallery located on the first floor of the train station that was inaugurated by Stoll at the beginning of the year.

“I’m especially pleased to be presenting the first photographic work of Belgian artist, Hans Op de Beeck,” Stoll enthuses.

“At his request, we have painted the walls of the gallery the same deep grey as the new carpeting to envelope his black and white pictures. A lone figure lost in thought lounges in a hyper-realistic environment that is in fact computer generated. There is a Hopper-like dreaminess in the pictures,” Stoll points out.

Hans Op de Beeck at Quai No. 1

“I’m not aiming for the experts,” the director reveals. “My target is the step-mother, or if you prefer, the person who does not go into a museum.”

“But you cannot show photography in the open air without provoking reactions,” he says. “You can show pictures that have no message, but as soon as you present something that is meaningful it relates one way or another to someone’s life. Intrusion is the theme running throughout the exhibition.”

Stoll mentions the reaction of a Vevey inhabitant who said that it was a scandal to show how beautiful a nuclear bomb can be.

Michael Light ’100 Suns’ along Quai Perdonnet

The aptly named American photographer Michael Light retrieved a hundred photographs of nuclear explosions taken between July 1945 and November 1962 (by Hollywood cameramen sworn to secrecy) that were lying dormant in American military archives.

“100 Suns”, the alarmingly aesthetic images of nuclear bombs line Quai Perdonnet against the tranquil beauty of Lake Geneva.

Ironically, the project “Unframed” by French art activist JR and coproduced by the Elysée photography museum in Lausanne, has not caused a public stir so far.

the 27-year-old JR has attained worldwide notoriety with his pictures of imams and rabbis disposed without permission on both sides of the Palestine/Israel divide, or with his portraits of women that serve to protect the favela shacks in Rio from rain.

JR, Lehnert & Landrock, Egypt 1923- 1930, the mosque of Imâm Ash-Shâfi î, Cairo / JR with team at work pasting on the strips © Céline Michel


Amongst the 14 images that he chose in the Elysée archives to plaster on monumental surfaces in Vevey – and that alone would form a festival – is the photograph of an Egyptian mosque.

The minaret towers over Vevey train station, raising more smiles in the country that voted against minarets, than it does scowls.

Around 2,000 visitors attended the inauguration of “Images” this weekend, more than 3,000 visited the shows.

World architecture descends on Rossinière

Deidi von Schaewen photos of interiors of huts in Capetown, South Africa against backdrop of Rossinière Balthus chalet

In collaboration with Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology and the Vitra Design Museum, the Vaud village of Rossinière is hosting a stunning display of scale models of traditional architecture from around the world. The models are showcased in several traditional chalets, including one that was home to painter Balthus, the village’s most famous resident. A world-first photo exhibit, visible only by train, complements the event.

A survey of indigenous architecture from around the world is on display in the tiny Swiss village of Rossinière (population 508).

“Learning from Vernacular”, running until August 21, is organized by Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the Vitra Design Museum.

The show is complemented by “Peregrinations”, a world-first photography exhibition that is visible only by train.

Photos taken in Africa by architect-photographer Deidi von Schaewen are dotted in strips along the train tracks leading up to the village from Montreux.

The brainchild of Pierre Frey, an art historian and professor at EPFL, “Learning from Vernacular” is being held in traditional chalets in the village, locally famous as the home to the painter Balthus (1908-2001).

Le Grand Chalet, regarded as one of the largest and most beautifully ornamental wooden chalets in Europe where Balthus lived during the second half of his life, is also being used for the show.

Frey selected 32 models at a scale of 1:20 from the unique collection of 700 models currently housed at the Archives of Modern Building at EPFL.

The models, exquisitely fabricated by architecture students over thirty years, showcase the ingenious solutions that populations around the globe have found to adapt their dwellings to local conditions.

Scale model of Indonesian house of chief visible through door of ancient Rossinière stable

Scale models of dwellings and work spaces from Afghanistan, Egypt, China, Indonesia, Korea, Italy, Scotland, Burkina Faso, Mali and many more countries are displayed in five Rossinière chalets or stables that date back several hundreds of years.

The models have been selected to highlight the diversity of spatial occupation or the use of specific building materials like wood, clay, straw, stone or bamboo.


Papouasie, New Guinea / Chalet Martin – Monika & Jean-Pierre Neff © Deidi von Schaewen

A sixth chalet, the Grand Chalet of Rossinière, home to the Balthus family (near the train station and pictured in back of photo above), serves as the entrance to the exhibition and houses the contemporary part of the exhibition.

Frey insists on the didactic purpose of the show. “By including examples of sustainable architecture by contemporary architects, we are highlighting the importance of solutions where we can ‘learn from the vernacular’.”

The contemporary architects that he has chosen to highlight all work with sustainability in mind.

They include the South African Carin Smuts, Hollmén Reuter Sanman from Finland, Indian Bijoy Jain, Simon Vélez from Colombia, Austrian Anna Heringer’s BASEhabitat and the US architectural schools Studio 804 and Rural Studio.

Rossinière councillor Jean-Pierre Neff tells Swisster that the village is “very proud to be part of this project.”

Neff doubles as president of the association for a centre of architecture, anthropology and territory that is working to find a permanent home for the entire collection of models.

“Our village of Rossinière is already a perfect example of vernacular architecture, since our chalets, many dating to the 16th and 17th century, are the pure product of traditional knowhow,” he says.

“We are counting on this project to help us preserve our own mountain architecture and help us resist the mounting pressure of real-estate developers,” says Neff, who is a carpenter by trade.


Yemenese house / Chalet Martin – Monika & Jean-Pierre Neff © Deidi von Schaewen

The exhibition was first presented to great acclaim in 2009 at Domaine de Boisbuchet, a country estate in southwest France that can best be described as the arts and crafts arm of the Vitra Design Museum.

Vitra, the designer and manufacturer of iconic furniture, is known for its collaborations with world-famous architects Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw and Alvaro Siza, all of whom have designed buildings for its premises in the German town of Weil am Rhein, just north of Basel.

Alexander von Vegesack, director of the museum, is confident that the exhibition will continue to travel.

He is in contact with the Mercati di Triano in Rome, the expected next venue, although he recognizes that “Rossinière is in perfect harmony with the subject.”

Frey said the work of photographer von Schaewen has been inspirational.


Deidi von Schaewen in front of her pictures of walls surrounding Nubian houses in north Soudan

Many of her images of on-location shots of structures comparable to the scale models illuminate the documentation backdrops in each exhibition space.

Von Schaewen’s photographs also provide the architectural photo journey through several African countries that is installed along the Golden Pass train tracks.

The GoldenPass railway line, run by the MOB (Montreux Oberland Bernois) climbs from the Mediterranean environment of Montreux to the Alpine village of Rougement, stopping on request at Rossinière.

Each of the 11 monumental hoardings between 12 and 15 metres in length that make up the exhibition ‘Peregrinations’, displays between four and five photos by Schaewen.

The images range from rudimentary constructions or their inhabitants in Mauritania, Sudan, Ethiopia and South Africa, offering a striking contrast to the backdrop of Alpine pastures.

“It is not just the colour that attracts us to Deidi’s pictures, it is her magnificently generous way of looking at things,” Frey says.

“She is not cultivating aesthetics or voyeurism, she is simply showing us that more than two and a half billion people in the world live in makeshift housing.”

Von Schaewen says that modern technology has really opened up the possibility of planning exhibitions in unusual venues. “In India I showed photographs four meters tall of sacred trees.”

“I love doing shows in bizarre places” she says.

The photographer publishes widely, including with Taschen, the German art publishing house.

‘Learning from Vernacular’ is an event for architecture devotees and children alike. It makes a wonderful outing, especially by train from Montreux, but don’t forget to ask the train to stop in Rossinière.

All photos © Deidi von Schaewen, clockwise:
Tribe from southern Ethiopia
Huts in Capetown, South Africa
Huts in Mauritania
Nubian interiors in north Sudan

Teen melancholy by cult Lausanne photographer

“Never young again” is the title of a cult web diary by 35-year-old Lausanne photographer, Germinal Roaux. From New York to Rome, from Mexico CIty to Lausanne, he captures the same troubled melancholy of adolescence, as if to arrest the course of time and forestall the passage to adulthood. His works are currently on show until April 11 in three Lausanne venues.

Germinal Roaux is a self-taught photographer and film-maker whose images could best be described as living emotions. He freezes moments that go beyond time, offering photographs that speak of what adolescents do, but more importantly of what they feel.

“I am very interested in the fragile moment of adolescence at the cusp of adulthood,” Roaux says. As a teenager, the artist experienced the death of his best friend, a tragic event that was to parachute him too quickly into the next phase of his life.

Roaux’s pictures are currently on display in three Lausanne venues, two of them hot spots for the young. “Never young again” presents the largest selection with 20 photographs in the night-club environment of Le Romandie.

“It is not so much the nostalgia of youth that I am attempting to express, but the deep sense of melancholy and untamed innocence of teenagers. They are searching to give meaning to their lives,” the photographer says to describe his work.


Roaux also takes part in a collective show of fiery artists at the experimental theatre venue Arsenic. Entitled “Black Mirror”, it holds up a mirror to punk and metal music as a reflection of society, also a recurring theme in Roaux’s work.

And finally, “Screaming at a wall” at the Fine Arts Museum in Lausanne delivers a collection of posters, including by Roaux, that highlight rock culture in Switzerland and that speak of its aggressive vitality.

Because he has the ability to capture his subjects as if a camera was never there, Germinal Roaux seizes expressions of naked sincerity that are surprisingly devoid of any exhibitionism. This is youth seen from the inside out, uncensored, uninhibited and unmanipulated.

“I do not want to steal their pictures,” says Roaux to explain how he first builds a relationship with the adolescents he portrays. “It can sometimes be a lengthy process because the first pictures are invariably too posed, too proud. I stick around long enough for them to go back to their activities and almost forget that I am there.”

“I want to show their beauty. Show them in a passage of life where they are not yet aware of the fragility and brutality of life,” he adds.

A pictorial diary documents Roaux’s forays into the world of teens. Portraits are mixed with close-ups of eccentric attire, fatigued silhouettes or traces on landscapes. An eerie beauty freezes time.

“It is also important to show what their daily lives are made of, the details and objects that speak of them,” indicates Roaux.

The photographer’s website contains no text and is viewed by young people the world over, many of whom leave messages on his Facebook page.

Roaux is currently finalizing the preparation of a full-length film which, he admits, has been deeply inspired by the pictures he has taken over the years and his work with teens.

He is already the author of “Iceberg” that won the prize for best emerging talent at the Locarno Film Festival in 2007 and was presented the next year at Robert de Niro’s TriBeCa Film Festival in New York.

Germinal Roaux gives new life and poetry to images by producing video picture panoramas, startling POLAROID SX-70 series (a fitting tribute to a technology being saved by The Impossible project – see article) as well as, at the request of Jeanne Moreau, an experimental trailer with 20,000 ‘stop motion’ images for a recent edition of the Angers Film Festival.

Vigorous campaign to save Polaroid, including art collection

Monique Jacot (CH), Zebras at the Knie Circus, 1988 © Polaroid collection

“Polaroid in peril” is an exhibition to alert public opinion to the possible dismantling of a major Polaroid photo art collection, part of which is housed at the Lausanne Elysée museum. It coincides with efforts by diehards to save a technology imperilled by digital photography and cut-throat investors. The Polaroids on show at the Elysée are a reminder of the naked power and beauty of images that digital adjustments cannot touch.

Seeking protection from a second bankruptcy in December 2008, Polaroid was bought by auction in April 2009 by PLR IP Holdings that is said to be long on marketing and short on loyalty to the original brand.

A collection of 16,000 photographs taken over 30 years by world-famous photographers, of which 4,500  have been on loan since 1991 to the Elysée Museum in Lausanne, are part of an inventory that PLR is looking partially to divest.

On 21 and 22 June 2010, Sotheby’s in New York will auction off more than 1,200 works from the collection, including photographs by David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol and Chuck Close.

The sale, that is expected to raise between 7.5 million and 11.5 million US dollars, is considered highly controversial since many of the photographers who entrusted their photographs to Polaroid had been led to believe that the collection would remain together for public viewing and study.

mitchell
K. Edward Mitchell (USA) Filtering Light, 1983 © Polaroid collection

When the genial inventor of Polaroid and Harvard drop-out, Edwin Land, produced the first instant camera with self-developing film in 1948, he sought the collaboration of photographers to help refine his product and test “the unique aesthetic potential” of his invention.

In exchange for the use of Polaroid cameras and film, including a large mobile “dark room” for larger formats, photographers were asked to contribute pictures to the budding collection.

The largest contributor was the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams who over 35 years was to produce more than 400 Polaroids for the collection, many of which are to be auctioned off by Sotheby’s.


adams

Ansel Adams’ “Aspens, Northern New Mexico” Sothby’s New York “Photographs from the Polaroid Collection

According to the photography critic and historian, A. D. Coleman “These were never sales, they were exchanges. This was permanent custodianship for Polaroid, with visitation rights for the photographers.”

A bankruptcy court in Minnesota is however, allowing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection to claw back equity. The company had been bought in 2005 by the rogue investor Tom Petters when it first filed for protection against bankruptcy. Petters has been found guilty of a 3.65 billion US dollars Ponzi scheme, not unlike the one set up by Bernard Madoff, and is presently in jail.

In response to the threat on the collection, William Ewing, director of the Elysée Museum, has organized an exhibition that is delightfully teasing and colourful, with tight line-ups of small formats surrounded by more expansive pictures.

mealhie

Anne Mealhie (France) 1982 © Polaroid collection

William Ewing anticipates that Sotheby’s will be extracting around 100 pictures from the collection in Lausanne and if they happen to be ones that are already on display, he intends to plaster a “For sale” protest banner if they are removed before the end of the show.

In the meantime, the Elysée is negotiating with Polaroid enthusiasts to secure sufficient funds to keep the rest of collection together. “The situation is still very fluid,” according to Ewing.

“Estimated prices are not outrageous because of the experimental nature of many photographs,” he says “and besides, prices would collapse if the entire collection were put on the market at the same time, which would defeat the purpose of the bankruptcy court.”

When Tom Petters took over Polaroid in 2005, he sounded the death knell of traditional analogue instant photography when he started developing digital products. Polaroid gradually depleted the stockpiled chemicals that it uses to make the film cassettes and started closing its factories.

And yet there are a billion Polaroid cameras in the world, the company claims.

Enter The Impossible Project led by a young Austrian artist and businessman, Florian Kaps, who is attempting to salvage the goods.

He has bought the rights to the Polaroid technology and intends to re-launch the production of the film from a re-activated Polaroid factory in Enschede, Holland.

This means completely reinventing the chemical procedures to obtain the required sophisticated chemicals and gels. An official announcement will be made on March 22, 2010.

kap
Florian Kap, Executive Director Marketing & Business Development, The Impossible Project

PLR is not making things any easier for The Impossible Project by putting Polaroid back in the limelight. It is “bringing its own brand of instant together with digital” explains president Scott W. Hardy and has appointed Lady Gaga as creative director for a specialty line of imaging products.

Lady Gaga is the wildly eccentric singer-cum-fashion-diva that has taken the pop world by storm. Watch this rollicking interview where she says that she wants to “reinspire the product and bring it into the future” and admits that her father is happy that she has a “proper” job at last.

The resulting market confusion has jolted ‘The Impossible Project’ into issuing a statement that says:

“The Impossible Project is the one and ONLY institution in the whole Milky Way that will be capable of producing analogue instant film for Polaroid cameras.”

Whatever the outcome, specialists concur to say that the contribution of Polaroid to the history of imaging is priceless and not quantifiable in market terms.

The invention of Polaroid cameras was to modify our perception to time by allowing the instant reproduction of reality 15 years before the technology of video instant replay was first used by television in 1963.

The exhibition at the Elysée until June 6 is a cool reminder of the magic of instant pictures and how some artists have used Polaroid to create new realities. It runs in parallel to the Sally Mann show.

Sally Mann’s innocent intimacy on show at Elysée

Candy Cigarette, 1989 © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Sally Mann, the American photographer who rose to international fame in the 90s with pictures of her own children, does not court controversy. But by allowing us to penetrate her intimacy and discover her damp and troubling environments, we are pulled into her obsessions. The haunting retrospective ‘The family, the land’ is accompanied in parallel at the Elysée Museum in Lausanne by ‘Polaroid in peril!’ dedicated to the survival of a Polaroid collection.

From March 6 to June 6, 2010 one of the world’s most prestigious, elegant, accomplished and impractical photography museums will be home to two exhibitions that will be hard to ignore.

“I wanted to end with a flourish,” says Canadian William Ewing who leaves the Elysée Museum after 14 memorable years at its helm. “I wanted the last exhibition before I leave to embrace emotion rather than offer a vision of the world.”

Voted “America’s Best Photographer” in 2001 by Time magazine, Sally Mann’s black and white pictures contain a disturbing power.

The exhibition at the Elysée, co-curated by Sally Mann herself, reveals major themes relating to three distinct periods in her work: children, landscapes and death.

Sally Mann met with international acclaim when the elaborately staged black and white photographs of her own children taken between 1984 and 1991 were published in 1992 under the title of “Immediate Family”. Taken in the sweltering heat of the summer months in Virginia, where Mann was born and continues to live, the pictures offer a chronicle of sweet nothings, with children playing, sleeping, swimming, jumping and being bored.

Virginia at 6, 1991 © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

No photographer is history had enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world, claimed a New York Times article at that time, indicating that more than a half-million dollars worth of photographs were sold in six months.

But Sally Mann was soon to experience a moral backlash. This was an era when the art world in the USA was coming under attack in response to Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic exhibitions and Jock Sturgis’s pictures of pubescent adolescents in nudist camps (that were raided by the FBI). The public funds of the National endowment for the arts experienced massive cuts.

Where Sally Mann saw only the adoring look of a mother on her three beautiful children, suddenly the languid nudity and stylized poses of Emmett, Jessie and Virginia were considered to be child pornography. She was allegedly told by a federal prosecutor, whom she consulted, that at least eight of her photographs could land her in jail.

Moving away from the human figure, Mann then concentrated until 1998 on capturing the laden atmosphere of the “Deep South”, her own homeland scarred by the history of the Civil War and slavery. Her landscapes drip with dampness and are charged with the “blood, sweat and tears that Africans have shed in the dark soil of their new ungrateful homeland”, to quote the artist.

At a time when digital photography was becoming increasingly popular, Sally Mann reverted to the use of nineteenth-century equipment complete with vintage lenses (including one said to have belonged to the famous French portraitist, Nadar).

Valentine Windsor, 1998 © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

The collodion process that she uses, with large plates that are dipped in a bath of silver nitrate immediately before they are exposed, requires the presence of a mobile dark room. Long exposure times in excess of five minutes contribute to the eeriness of her photographs and forbid any form of spontaneity.

The last section of the Lausanne exhibition, entitled “What remains”, is dedicated to putrefaction and death, but in such a stylized manner that it (almost) escapes morbidity.

The show ends with giant close-ups of the faces of her children who have now reached adulthood, “treated as landscapes”, as William Ewing points out. She asks them to hold expressions that are “sweet, serene, just a little mysterious”.

Virginia_42_2004 © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

A key to understanding Sally Mann is to be discovered in an award-winning film that accompanies the exhibition. We see the Manns on, what can best be described as, a working animal farm in the thick, luxuriant vegetation of Virginia. The family lives in communion with the cycles of nature, including death and regeneration.

What appears to be a deeply intellectual production bordering on the gruesome suddenly emerges as an innocent light being cast on the natural complexities of life.

“She sees the world in images,” says Larry Mann of his wife. “That’s just the way she functions.” Her latest work, not on display, is a tender portraiture of the body of her husband weakened by incurable muscular dystrophy.

“The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best,” Sally Mann says to explain the intimacy in her works. “I’m nothing but full of respect for people who travel the world to make art, but that’s not my way. It never occurred to me to leave home to make art.”

Occupying the basement of the Elysée Museum, the “Polaroid in peril” exhibition dedicated to alerting public opinion to the risk of seeing a priceless collection dismembered because of the repeated bankruptcies of Polaroid could not be more different than the one by Sally Mann.

It is colourful, insolent, amusing and full of life. It is also a serious statement in favour of a technology that revolutionized our relationship to time, the first to suggest that immediacy was possible.

Powerful photos expose dark side of America

Mirko Martin, L.A. Crash

Two photography exhibitions in Switzerland put America under the spotlight. In Fribourg, a collection of pictures taken in 1935-42 by the greatest American photographers of the time documents the destitution of American farmers hit simultaneously by the Great Depression, draught and industrialization. In Bienne a young German photographer mixes Hollywood fiction with real life scenes captured in the natural decor of Los Angeles.

From famine to fantasy, two unrelated exhibitions in Fribourg and Bienne offer stark images that are not dissimilar in their portrayal of the darker side of the United States. But because they tell stories, they do not make us feel miserable.

“The convergence of the Great Depression, a severe draught and the arrival of tractors meant that those who lived in the food cradle of the US in the thirties and early forties were too poor to eat,” explains Emmanuel Schmutz, curator of The Bitter Years (Les années amères de l’Amérique en crise) at the University of Fribourg Library.

From 1935 to 1942, the Farm Security Administration created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal to support the devastated agricultural sector commissioned the biggest names in American photography to document the dramatic situation.

It was the first time that photographs were used as a political instrument to alert public opinion.

The powerful imagery inspired The Grapes of Wrath, according to John Steinbeck who wrote his masterpiece in 1939.

Dorothea Lange, A mother and her children – California, 1939
© Collection du Château d’Eau, Toulouse

Russell Lee, An emigrant’s daughter – Oklahoma, 1939
© Collection du Château d’Eau, Toulouse

“What happened in the States in those years is not so different to the situation in the south of Italy today,” ventures Schmutz. “African immigrants brought in as slave labour replace the local population that can no longer survive on the land.”

Some 270’000 images were taken during the campaign by photographers infused with compassion who were sent out on the agricultural trail, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Marion Post-Wolcott, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein and Jack Delano.

Arthur Rothstein, A farm worker on the move – Tennessee, 1936
© Collection du Château d’Eau, Toulouse

Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs and his children – Tengle, Alabama,1936
© Collection du Château d’Eau, Toulouse

Out of 77 photographs on display in Fribourg, some already belong to our collective consciousness, notably Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother taken in California in 1936.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother – California, 1936
© Collection du Château d’Eau, Toulouse

According to Schmutz, Lange was on her way back home after a long day when she passed a sign indicating a migrant camp but she carried on. Thirty miles later she turned back.

She stayed only ten minutes in the camp, but the photograph that she took of a migrant widow was to become a universal icon of a modern day Madonna.

It was also to cause a lot of grief when the little girls in the picture, now grown up, accused Lange of capitalizing on misery. However, when their mother, Florence Thompson, was dying of cancer in 1983, a nation-wide campaign led by the New York Times allowed the necessary funds to be raised to meet the medical expenses that she could not afford, although it was already too late.

In Bienne, another reality meets the eye. L.A Crash at the CentrePasquArt presents scenes of cops, car chases and imminent disasters but we are never told whether they are real or fake.

Mirko Martin is the Berlin-based photographer so intensely fascinated by Los Angeles, the underbelly of Hollywood, that he has woven a bizarre visual web that is almost impossible to identify as fact or as fiction.

© Mirko Martin

© Mirko Martin

“It is precisely this ambiguity that interests us” says Daniel Mueller, director of PhotoforumPasquArt in Bienne/Biel, where the exhibition was launched this weekend and takes place until 14 March. “But then again skepticism is part of the process of confronting images” he adds.

Under the bright sunshine of California, people loiter on sidewalks ignoring cadavers, cops arrest a young kid, a woman tramp kneels pathetically in the street. Life goes on.

© Mirko Martin

“What continues to attract me to a part of the world that I first discovered on a Fulbright scholarship is the constant flux between utopia and dystopia,” Mirko Martin said.

“This is a place where you can aim for your wildest dreams, a utopia that is epitomized by Hollywood, but where the tensions generated by gang activities, race riots, the threat of earthquakes are also constantly present,” he says, adding “I am fascinated by this contrast.”

“By working at the threshold between reality and fiction, by integrating film sets and scenes into my pictures, or fictional situations into natural décor, the objective is to intensify the L.A. experience,” Martin explains.

© Mirko Martin

© Mirko Martin

Ironically, one of the most intense pieces on display in the exhibition is not even a photograph. A black screen delivers the transcript of the broken conversation that we can hear against the sound of hovering helicopters. It is taking place at night at the scene of a police shootout in a gang neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“Hey, did you hear the gunfire?” a man asks. For the next five minutes the accidental onlookers interpret events that neither they nor we can see. In the following order, but not in its entirety, we catch a conversation straight out of the theatre of the absurd, that could have been written by Ionesco or Beckett:

“These gangs just don’t give a fuck.”
“What’s that guy doing?”
“It looks like he was wiping blood off his hand.”
“He was involved, I can see that, I guarantee that.”
“Damn it.”
“Well, that was weird man.”
“It’s a weird night, Buddy.”
“It’s over, they killed him.”
“You shouldn’t be out here at night.”
“In Phoenix . . . you can rent machine guns by the hour…”
“Do you got the time?”

There are different worlds colliding in the streets of L.A., people from so many different ethnic backgrounds, says the artist, emphasizing that “This tension, I am convinced, generates the great American energy”.

Working also with video, his latest work is a full hour documentary on the street story of a homeless man in L.A. who lost his family in the 9/11 attack.

“My main interest is people” Mirko Martin admits.

Two other exhibitions take place at CentrePasquArt at the same time: the enigmatic references to TV by Swiss photographer Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, with a display simply entitled Mathieu Bernard-Reymond TV and a Swiss delirious combo that operates under the name Com&Com (commercial communication) with the show Com&Com – La réalité dépasse la fiction (reality is often stranger than fiction).

Lausanne Elysee features iconic publisher Steidl


Gerhard Steidl, photo Bolofo

Gerhard Steidl, the world’s most prolific independent publisher of photography and art today is offered a major exhibition at the Elysée museum in Lausanne. The list of artists he publishes is like a celebrity roll call and includes the fashion diva Karl Lagerfeld and the legendary Robert Frank. But Steidl is not out to impress. He only wants to share his passion for images and get us to turn the pages.

In a curious twist of events, one of the first and finest museums in the world dedicated to the art and culture of photography is not presenting photography alone this time. The Elysée has invited the German publisher Gerhard Steidl to show how photography is an art form that happily espouses the printed page. The exhibition illustrates the process that leads to the books considered to be some of the finest in the art world today.

“The artist comes to me with an idea and I let it flow. I never have a concept in mind beforehand. I simply apply my knowledge to produce the book”, said Steidl at the press opening. Alec Soth, whose road show pictures are the objects of several Steidl books, says that he is “the dream editor.”

Steidl’s discrete and faultless savoir-faire is the reason that artists have kept coming or returning to him for the past 40 years.
His first collaborations at the age of 17, were with Joseph Beuys, the sculptor and performance artist whose art extremism would normally have terrified such a young man. Instead, Beuys encouraged Steidl to consider printing as a form of art, allowing him to multiply works, as Beuys himself was doing with his own projects.

“The way he made my book reminded me of the drawings that Picasso or Frank Lloyd Wright sketched rapidly on a restaurant’s napkin: he had understood the concept in ten seconds” the Canadian photographer, Jeff Wall, whose enigmatic compositions seem to fly out of Steidl’s pages writes in the stark but luscious catalogue.

The co-curators of the exhibition, the museum’s director William Ewing, and Nathalie Herschdorfer have been preparing the show for over a year.“It is the transversal quality of Steidl’s work that we find so interesting, his capacity to work closely with artists and produce objects of great beauty. We wanted to show that photography does not have to be shown on walls” said Herschdorfer.

And indeed the display is more a voyage into the heart of bookmaking than a visit to a museum. We are taken into the ‘House of Steidl’ in Göttingen (two hours north of Frankfurt in Germany) or in ‘Steidlville’ – as the American artist Roni Horn has affectionately renamed it.

Simultaneously editing house, printing factory and design studio, it is also a hostel for artists and home to Steidl, all wrapped into one. The Elysée museum has been transformed to reproduce the sense of creative excitement present in Steidl’s environment, with separate sections dedicated to different stages of the production and printing process.

“This included making changes until the very last minute, when new pieces would arrive to replace the ones already in place” admits Nathalie Herschdorfer, as if the Elysée itself had become a 24-hour printing press.

All of Steidl’s publications begin their lives in large grey boxes that become the receptacles of the messages of exchange, artist’s desires, prints, CDs, paper samples and other inspirational elements, that William Ewing calls “the raw material” of the books. Several are carefully orchestrated in the display.

“Artists have a better chance to be published with me when they send handwritten letters. This immediately creates a link, even if the person is on the other side of the ocean” Steidl revealed.

Featured artists include Jim Dine, whose hallmark hearts are in many permanent collections museums all over the world; Raymond Depardon, the Pulitzer-winning French photo-journalist who co-founded Gamma agency; Deborah Turbeville, a Harper’s Bazaar former editor who produces vintage-like scenes; and the Swiss-born grand master Robert Frank, whose The Americans revolutionized documentary photography. They are amongst the 400 artists whose works Steidl has brought to new life.

Stedil’s collaborations also extend to the world of fashion and glamour. Karl Lagerfeld, who shares his passion for photography and books, has entrusted him with numerous Chanel image campaigns. A Chanel font, used worldwide by the House of Chanel, is a result of their artistic partnership.


Karl Lagerfeld

Immersed in a world of icons, how does it feel to become an icon himself, asked Swisster? “Although it’s a very nice experience to have an exhibition, status does not interest me. I’d much rather be at home with my paper and ink” Steidl replied. “Reading is a solitary activity. It doesn’t help to be surrounded” he added, admitting that an exhibition on books is in fact a paradox.

“My main interest is to know that the knowledge I have been developing with my artists is moving onto the next generation. The Lausanne University of Design (ECAL), for example, has some excellent students” Steidl concluded brightly.

Steidl’s books are a mixture of “intellectual content and form” for what he qualifies as his niche market of 15,000 or so readers. The present exhibition allows Steidl to broaden his audience and the Elysée to demonstrate that photography is story-telling that lives handsomely in books as well.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.