Publications

Spanning from the 1970s to the present day, The Missing Thread, curated by the Black Orientated Legacy Development Agency (BOLD), charts the shifting landscape of Black British culture and the unique contribution it has made to Britain’s rich fashion design history. Black creativity has had a profound influence on British fashion and continues to be referenced to great effect, often without acknowledgement. The exhibition seeks to redress this, celebrating the unique visions and impact of a generation of trailblazing Black creatives whose contributions have been misrepresented or excluded from the story of British fashion. Set against a backdrop of politics and culture, the show examines how Black style and creativity has evolved across the decades and in turn influenced the world of fashion through music, photography, art and design.

Instinctive, spontaneous and unclassifiable, Walter Pfeiffer’s images are an anthem to youthfulness. The Swiss photographer has influenced a generation of photographers such as Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller. This collaborative publication came to life after Pfeiffer’s acceptance to run a workshop at ÉCAL with the emerging photographers of the Lausanne school. Rather than teaching a technical class, his intervention took a more sensory form by inviting students to take hold of his world without limitations or a specific goal. Collected under the title Choli Cholie – an allusion to a recurring remark by the artist – the images produced by the students are at once a reference and a tribute to the work of the famous photographer.

This book features a compilation of work from photography students from one of the world’s most prestigious art colleges – the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ÉCAL) in Switzerland. The photographic works revealed by ÉCAL Photography provide an insight into the up-and-coming photographers, and trace the beginnings of innovative practices in photography. The school’s multidisciplinary strength is evident in the images produced, creating a visual platform for the artistic laboratory that exits within the context of the school. The photo-book includes interviews with visiting professors, including Oliver Broomberg, Jason Evans, Paolo Roversi and Joachim Schmid.

For years, Swiss artist Monica Ursina Jäger’s work has been inspired by Modernist-style architecture fused with man-made landscapes that represent her fantasies for the future mixed with the dystopia of failure. Topographies, created in collaboration with Winfried Heininger, consists of one twelve metre long accordion-folded image created from hundreds of collaged images from the artist’s working archive. Readers can turn the pages to follow the image, as if with a filmic tracking shot, or they can open the publication to its full extent and navigate Jäger’s arresting fictional visions. This is a poetic visual journey full of unexpected scenarios.

Andreas Züst (1946-2000) was a Swiss photographer, painter, art collector, social butterfly, publisher, film producer, bibliophile, scientist and patron of the arts. Utilising the camera as a diary and faithful companion, Züst started documenting and photographing Zurich’s art and culture scene starting from the 1970s. Menschen Tiere Abenteuer is a chronological view of Züst’s work exposed through his daily observations of visual phenomena, social connections, the notion of time, and love of the camera. With the ability to transcend boundaries between subcultures, Züst’s broad-minded spirit is captured in simple scenes that expand into emotion.

René Burri’s photographs have become an important part of documenting history. The Swiss photographer’s work lives within the collective consciousness – recalling politics and society, historic turning points, triumphs and crises occurring in the twentieth century. Burri is considered one of the best photojournalists of our time. Aged fifteen, he photographed Winston Churchill. Later portrayals of key figures include Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Anwar as-Sadat and Muammar al-Gaddafi. With a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philipp Keel and Hans-Michael Koetzle, the two volumes of Mouvement are introduced by distinct prefaces with separated insights into the medium of photography, Burri’s oeuvre and the man himself.

Questioning photography is not a new approach. Ever since its invention over 175 years ago, artists have consistently questioned the nature of the medium. This volume tells a wild and ironic, sometimes melancholic history of photography, presenting ground-breaking texts by the most radical writers on photography: the photographers themselves. Against a familiar backdrop of the accelerating disappearance of analogue photography and the parallel triumphal progress of digital photography, the thematic-image section of works from the past fifty years engages new ways of re-picturing and inhabiting photographic history.  A linked publication, Manifestos was made in cooperation with Fotomuseum Winterthur, further examining this alternative history on the medium.

In 2016, the Verbier 3-D Foundation invited British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews to participate in their artist residency programme in the alpine area of Bagnes, Switzerland. Immersing herself within an environment consisting of glaciers and underground nuclear shelters -as well as reading Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818)- she created a new body of photographic work which explores the contemporary relevance of Shelley’s novel in relation to the current era of the Anthropocene period. The publication In Search of Frankenstein further develops the work Dewe Mathews made during the residency, visualising the opposing environments that coexist under the influence of climate change and technological advances in Switzerland.

In War Without War, the Swiss photographer Meinrad Schade documents those lingering, damaging marks of war in a particular place: in this case, the former Soviet Union. Claiming not to be a war photographer, Schade graciously exposes the non-apparent traces of war passed down from one generation to the next. The book embraces subjects that range from scars on the landscape to people’s traumatised psyches that resonate long after the conflict is officially over. The book is an impressive account of life fluctuating between war and peace. It is a study on the effects of historic events on the individual.

In this unique perspective on Switzerland’s psychological landscape, Swiss photographer Andri Pol leaves us with an impression contrary to the ordinarily sublime image of the alpine country. Punchy images create a paradise for oddities that thrive within these valleys and mountains unlike anywhere else in the world. Three-hundred-and-fifty-pages-thick, this photo-book presents Switzerland as it occurs in a travel guide only with a twist; exposing the unknown realities of a country.

As Joël Vacheron writes in this publication, Yann Gross’ project could be compared to David Lynch’s The Straight Story. Horizonville is a detailed photographic investigation that touches on the symbolic misrepresentation of a geographical site and the construction of an imaginary community. Through a slow-paced approach, Gross is able to capture marginal modes of existence and produce a gaze that emphasizes elusive details that often go unnoticed by the ordinary viewer.

Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of famous Swiss photographer, Werner Bischof, Standpunkt features the life and work of the artist, told ‘in his own words’ through personal images, contact sheets, drawings and original texts. Known for his stark images portraying the perils of hardship intertwined with the beauty of inner strength, this book also reveals the personal distinctions and contradictions of a photographer that define his point of view. This is a rare experience.

In 1996, the Zurich-based artist and curator Esther Eppstein founded message salon – a travelling space for experimental art practices and ideas. The book Message Salon is the first comprehensive publication on the travelling art space where many well-known artists made their first public appearances. With eight hundred images, most of which were previously unpublished, the book documents the exhibitions that took place at message salon’s various locations, as well as the artists and exhibition-goers. Accompanying the photographs are essays, such as Nadine Olonetzky’s text based on a detailed conversation with Esther Eppstein and art historian Jacqueline Burckhardt, reflecting on the significance of the space and the continuing contributions by Eppstein to Switzerland’s art scene.