Concrete Photography strives for a pure photography that focuses on itself and is detached from iconography and symbolism. Born in Basel in 1929, photographer Roger Humbert is a pioneer of Concrete Photography and has produced an extensive oeuvre from the 1950s to the present day. Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie presents Humbert’s important position in 20th century photography in a solo exhibition, which shows a selection of photograms from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, created with experimental light sources and for- mal elements, as well as late works created in the past 20 years.
Roger Humbert describes his photography with a short and yet complex sentence: “I photograph the light”. Based on the theories of the English photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn around 1916, concrete photography concentrates on the mysterious quality of light. Further stations in the history of development are the well-known Schadographs by Christian Schad, the Rayographs by Man Ray, and the photograms, luminograms, and photomontages by László Moholy-Nagy taken at the Bauhaus.
