The Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection first became permanent when the museum’s exhibition space was expanded in 2003. Until then the museum had functioned more as an exhibition hall in which photographic exhibitions were first held in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Since then, a themed exhibition from the collection of approximately 4000 works has been organised once a year, allowing different perspectives and approaches to the collection; for example: Cold Play – Set 1 from the Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection and Stories/History – Set 3 from the Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection.

The frequency of exhibitions is determined by the fragile nature of colour photography, which forms a large part of the collection. Since the 1990s, however, there have been technological improvements. A combination of careful handling and planning is necessary to ensure that such photographic works are not merely stored, but can also be exhibited in the future. Therefore the collections are not physically accessible to the public outside the exhibitions; instead, two years ago, the Online Collection, in which all represented artists are publicised along with most of their work, was made available to visitors and experts. While this conservation strategy preserves the originals in airconditioned storage rooms, the Online Collection also raises the profile of the museum and the artists represented there, and makes them constantly accessible worldwide.

The curatorial approach to exhibitions of the collection follows the Fotomuseum Winterthur’s principle of presenting a wideranging and discursive overview of contemporary photography through genres and definitions. The collection dates from about 1960. When the Fotomuseum Winterthur was in its infancy in 1993, large sets of work classified as documentary photography, whether conceptual or narrative, such as that of Lewis Baltz, Hans Danuser, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Gilles Peress or Joel Sternfeld, formed the basis of the collection. Since then, with an eye to the museum’s own programme of exhibitions, it has continued to expand through acquisitions, gifts and permanent loans. In 2005 the private Jedermann Collection was finally acquired with financial help from trusts and private individuals associated with the museum. Conceptual photography from the early 1970s onwards, which up to this point had been somewhat under-represented in the Fotomuseum Winterthur’s collections, was now given a serious boost with about 300 important works. In the annual exhibitions, this body of work, which includes even the most contemporary, now creates exciting links and juxtapositions between documentary and invention, photographic evidence and assertion, analogue and digital, and between stillness and movement.

This year, in Printed Matter – Set 6 from the Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection the focus was on an aesthetic and technical approach to photography. With the advent, around 1970, of conceptual photography, whose exponents denounced exaggeratedly auratic notions of the medium, even small publications and booklets, cheaply produced and with large print runs, as well as invitations to exhibitions, began to be seen as works of art. After this subversive escape from the diktats of Fine Art Prints, the art world opened its doors to photography, which had previously been excluded on ideological grounds, with well-known consequences, and some delusions and confusions. Today artists as well as photographers with a hard-earned conception of themselves make use of the aesthetic qualities of the printed image, in order to develop new, surprising and sometimes spatial installations. Along with the physically printed image, however, Printed Matter also features second-degree photographic realities as part of the exhibition; previously published media images from magazines and books are deconstructed, appraised or analysed with a certain irony by the new generation of image-makers.

The exhibition The Dream of the Self, the Dream of the World – Set 2 from the Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection can be viewed as a counterpoint, in which the existence of the individual, particularly the introverted photographic view of the self in relation to the outside world, that is to say society, is revealed and examined. Here the autobiography represents an inexhaustible reservoir of experiences and ideas. Through drastically contrasting compositions of images, the exhibition shows that this kind of universal theme has been for decades, and still is, the driving force behind the creation of photographic images. In confronting us with haunting and sometimes painful images, the photographers demonstrate the need to seek and find true identity, and to unmask and transcend false identity in its turn.