The Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, holds a vast retrospective of the work of Zurich born Werner Bischof, a meteor of the 1940s’ and 50s’ photojournalism. The centenary of the birth of this aesthete-photographer provides an opportunity to take an in-depth look at his work, from the beginnings to the artist’s tragic end in 1954. On May 16 of that year, Werner Bischof died in a car accident on a mountain road in the Andes, in Peru. He had just celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday. He had been a member of Magnum Photos for five years and collaborated with some of the biggest magazines at the time, including Life.
The exhibition tells the story of his career from the end to the beginning, or just about: it opens with black-and-white images of the United States taken in 1953 when Werner Bischof was crisscrossing the country on an assignment from Standard Oil. Bird’s eye view of streets, shots of parking lots, workers on the Golden Bridge: the eye of the photographer draws a straight line between the rural and urban landscapes of the American way of life. His is an ideal vision that another Zurich native, Robert Frank, would later piece together on his road trip across the US.
Bischof and Frank, alongside other German-speaking Swiss like René Burri and Emil Schulthess, were molded by Hans Finsler at the Academy of Applied Arts in Zurich (an influence which Robert Frank absorbed through the intermediary of his teacher Michael Wolgensinger). Precise, well-thought-out photography, obedient to the principles of New Objectivity, however, enriched by humanism and insatiable discovery of the world.
A tension between graphic precision and existential angst is a common thread in Werner Bischof’s work. Whether he’s traveling across war-torn Europe, India, the Far East, or the Americas, Bischof maintains the same elegance of style. The photographer’s ethics at work: attentive to those most vulnerable, hostile to ugliness and violence: a young flute player in Peru, junks on the South China Sea, Japanese monks in a snowstorm—to name just three among Werner Bischof’s best known images.
The retrospective at the Musée de l’Elysée concludes with the photographer’s formative years in Switzerland, an exhibition within exhibition, entitled “Helvetica,” just like the font. His experiments with light, still lifes, fashion photos, industrial images, and nature shots demonstrate the wide range of Bischof’s formal mastery. While the decision to display mainly the photographer’s contact sheets leaves one rather underwhelmed, it is consistent with the scope of this tribute, spanning original prints and material exhibited for the first time.
EXHIBITION
Werner Bischof, Point de vue et Helvetica
From January 27th to May 1st, 2016
Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée
1014 Lausanne
Switzerland
http://www.elysee.ch
