Begun over twenty-five years ago, the series Die Winter (The Winter in German) is tied to Stéphane Winter’s personal story. Abandoned at birth in South Korea in 1974 and taken in by an orphanage, he was adopted by a Swiss couple at the age of one. Near the age of fifteen, he began to photograph his parents. His images are a mix of staged and candid photographs portraying the trio’s daily life with humor and tenderness.
This work mixes and documents a skewed but positive view of his own adoption and the intimacy of a middle-class Swiss family during the late-20th century. Stéphane Winter makes us reconsider our idea of the traditional family and invites us to get rid of our misconceptions. The idea to exhibit his photographs came to him after the death of his father, struck by a heart attack in 2011. Going through his father’s papers, Stéphane happened upon a letter from his doctor dated September 8, 1969 – of which a reproduction, placed in an envelope, is inserted into the book– telling him that he was sterile. “I found it awful and funny,” he recalls. “It felt like I found my birth certificate.” Among the thousands of images of his parents that he took as a child, a teenager, and then as an adult, he selected around thirty shots, with which he managed to recount the indescribable: his being parachuted into this middle-class Swiss family residing in Ecublens in the suburbs of Lausanne.
His father Robert, an engineer, is staged in a swimming cap, standing upright in his bath. His mother Pierrette, who took care of household chores, also allowed portraits in which she mocks herself. Through this images, Stéphane braids a tight connection with them, giving himself evidence that, shot after shot, despite the physical difference and his friends’ jokes about his Asian feature, the three of them are all part of the same inseparable family.
A little insert in the book presents, in a square format much like a Polaroid, humorous photos, dated and captioned by hand. Photos of the author as a baby– in a toy peddle-car, next to a snowman, or on the balcony of a mountain cabin. They are commonplace Kodachrome color photos, works of parents amazed by their son.
Irène Attinger
Irène Attinger is in charge of the library and bookstore of the Maison Éuropéenne de la Photographie in Paris.
Stéphane Winter, Die Winter
Published by Éditions GwinZegal
30€
