| | | |  | | | Emanuel Friedrich Dänzer: The photographer’s daughter Marie, c. 1856
© Private collection Liestal | | | | | After Nature | | | | Swiss Photography in the 19th Century | | | | | | | ... until 30 January 2022 | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | Anonymous: The Zurich railway station, 1846/47 built by Gustav Albert Wegmann, c. 1847
© Private collection Zürich | | | | | | After photography was proclaimed as a French invention in 1839 in Paris, the new medium quickly embarked on its victory march throughout Europe. Although the race for technical innovation and the development of this new craft began in the continent’s cultural centres, the heavy cameras soon made their way to the villages and the countryside, to remote valleys and mountains, where photographers gained recognition for their images “after nature”. How was photography able to spread so rapidly? Who were the pioneers who constantly came up with new applications, from representative portraits to wanted posters, from nature and landscape studies to the representation of industry and technology, from scientific illustration to the documentation of events?
This exhibition, organised as a co-production between the Fotostiftung Schweiz (Winterthur), the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne) and the MASI Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (Lugano), and curated by Martin Gasser and Sylvie Henguely, presents a previously underexplored chapter in the story of Swiss photography. For the very first time, a retrospective exhibition presents the first 50 years of this new medium in Switzerland. It brings together exquisite works from numerous public and private collections, in order to capture this momentous invention in its artistic, social and economic dimensions. Impressive examples also convey the competition and correlations between the various types of pictorial media. Up until the 1890s, photographic images were judged according to the same standards as paintings. They were often also reproduced in printed form, as this was deemed more trustworthy, and they could be reproduced in greater numbers. | | | | | |  | | | Johann Linck: Machine of the Sulzer Brothers, 1880s
© Collection Fotostiftung Schweiz | | | | | | Switzerland was not able to provide the same abundance of internationally outstanding photographers as for example France, Germany and England. This small country, with its small-scale federal structures and large cultural and political differences, simply did not represent fertile ground. Although the history of photography and the history of the Swiss federal state, founded in 1848, overlap with each other, developments occurred by no means synchronously. Just as there was never an actual Swiss cultural centre, there was also never a centre for photography.
Whereas, in the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, photography underwent phenomenal expansion as a result of direct communication with the very first photographic pioneers in Paris, in the German-speaking areas of the country it only spread locally and regionally, by travelling photographers who largely remain unknown. Here, the daguerreotype process was preferred for a long time, whereas photographers in the Frenchspeaking areas were also early adopters of Talbot’s salt paper process. People’s preference for either the artistic aspect of photography (as in Romandy), or the clarity and precision of the metal-based process (as in the German-speaking parts of the country) probably also played a role in these differences.
The Italian influence, on the other hand, came to be noticed in those few photographers in southern Switzerland who learned their craft in Italy. It was only in the 1860s that they could really establish themselves in the rural environment of their home country. But as a result of the introduction of the glass negative and albumin prints, the craft gained momentum on both sides of the French/German linguistic border, as well as in Ticino – lively exchanges between the regions were the result. However, photography was still regarded as a craft, being presented to the overall Swiss public for the first time in a national exhibition in Zurich in 1883. The discussion as to whether photography could also be regarded as an artistic medium only began at the end of the 19th century, in opposition to its unstoppable development into a visual mass medium. | | | | | |  | | | Francis Frith: The Staubbach, c. 1862
© ETH-Bibliothek Zürich | | | | | | The discovery of Switzerland by means of photography, the success of this new pictorial medium, photography as a craft, photography and art, identity and control, photography in industry and science, photography in exhibitions and books – the exhibition covers topics such as these on the basis of more than 300 original objects and vintage prints from the period, and also makes the fascinating materiality of early photography clearly apparent. So, for example, you can experience the different effects of a daguerrotype and a salt paper print that came into being at the same time in a direct comparison. And it also becomes clear why this new pictorial medium also caused confusion: Was it some new kind of drawing? Or a painting, which is still missing its colour? What do "daguerréotype d’après nature" or "nach dem Leben photographiert" mean? Because photography enabled the visible world to magically depict itself, like a "pencil of Nature" (Henry Fox Talbot), beholders were amazed right from the very first moment, provoking a debate about the relationship between reality and portrayal – a debate which has not lost any of its currency even today.
As well as presenting outstanding individual pieces and unknown works, the exhibition also acknowledges the extraordinary achievements of important photographers such as Johann Baptist Isenring (St Gallen), Carl Durheim (Berne), Jakob Höflinger (Basel), Adrien Constant-Delessert (Lausannne), Jean-Gabriel Eynard (Geneva) and Angelo Monotti (Ticino). At the same time, the intention is to convey a differentiated overall impression of the interplay between photography’s different outward forms and methods. Especially in this age of digitalisation and fast mobile phone photography, it is important to remember the medium’s analogue beginnings once again, when even the exposure time lasted several minutes, and when even after hours of work in the darkroom, you were by no means certain that an image would even result.
A comprehensive publication, in German and French, accompanying the exhibition will be available from Steidl, Göttingen.
The exhibition is a co-production by Fotostiftung Schweiz (Winterthur), Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (Lugano) and Photo Elysée (Lausanne). | | | | | |  | | | Anonymous: The taxidermist Johann Kürsteiner, c. 1850
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