Real Fantasies
New Photography from Switzerland
4 March to 21 May 2006
Stories, Histories
Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur
4 March to 5 November 2006
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Switzerland
Phone: 41 52 234 10 60
Real Fantasies New Photography in Switzerland
With Cristian Andersen, Ruth Blesi, Collectif_Fact, Marianne Engel, Klodin Erb / Eliane Rutishauser, Serge Frühauf, Goran Galic / Gian-Reto Gredig, Anna Kanai, Körner Union, Hendrikje Kühne / Beat Klein, Florence Lacroix, Loan Nguyen, Marco Poloni, Katja Richter, Rockmaster K, Daniel Schibli, Christian Schwager, Shirana Shahbazi, Nele Stecher, Christian Waldvogel and Herbert Weber.
Today, more than ever before, photography is a hybrid, a composite that mixes documentary and fiction, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, analog and digital, visual pleasure with iconoclasm. As such, it reflects the fragmentation of personal experience, the dislocation of our world view and the loss of our sense of self. Found photography, banal photography, manipulated photography, photo-romans, staged photography, morphed photography, resilient documentary photography this visual medium still has despite the fact that the art market is now turning away from it a boundless ability to question, analyse and reflect the world around us. Needless to say, the availability of so many different photographic approaches grants enormous freedom, but with it there must also be a structural awareness of the medium itself and of its context in the media in general, for only in the friction generated between application and reflection can true visual greatness, density and complexity be achieved. Swiss photography has developed exponentially in the past two decades,as documented in a number of publications since 1990: Wichtige Bilder Fotografie in der Schweiz, 1990 (Important Images Photography in Switzerland), Nouveaux intinéraires, 1991 (New Directions), Voir la Suisse autrement, 1991 (Seeing Switzerland differently), Helvetia condensed, 1992, Blind Junge Fotografie aus der Schweiz, 1992 (Blind Young Photography from Switzerland), Photographie in der Schweiz von 1940 bis heute, 1992 (Photography in Switzerland from 1940 to the Present), Aus der Romandie, 1993 (From French Switzerland), Bilderzauber ein seriöses Spiel, 1996 (The Magic of Images A Serious Game), Die Klasse, 1996 (The Class),Weltenblicke Reportagefotografie und ihre Medien, 1997 (World Views Photojournalism and Its Media), Young Neue Fotografie in der Schweizer Kunst, 1999 (Young New Photography in Swiss Art) and Zeitgenössische Fotokunst aus der Schweiz, 2002 (Contemporary Photography from Switzerland). These publications show how, in Switzerland, as on the international scene, a wealth of visual ideas, visual strategies and approaches has made its mark and how the world of photography has grown in richness and intensity year by year. In the light of this, we decided to find out how young photographers and artists are actually working with the medium of photography today. We wanted to know how they were dealing with the growth of digitisation and with the dominating influence of the media in a world that is becoming increasingly abstract and from which any direct perception is rapidly disappearing.
Our questions to curators, artists, university tutors and gallery owners throughout Switzerland brought many insights. At our request some two hundred and fifty artists submitted their portfolios and after a lengthy process of elimination we eventually selected twenty-one artistic positions which together reflect the richness and intensity of the submissions as a whole. Each and every visual statement stands alone. Together, however, they delineate certain thematic and methodological fields, which we have presented under three groupings: Exploring the World, Constructing the World and World-Self-Worlds. The guiding principle here is an exacting yet enjoyable confluence of reality and fiction: fantastic realities and real fantasies. Sometimes staged photography can be more realistic (more tangibly representative of the world) than documentary photography. That is what makes it such an appealing and candid mirror of our times. We live in a world of ambiguity; floating and drifting. These photographs do the same.
An exhibition of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, curated by Urs Stahel and Thomas Seelig.
Main sponsor of the exhibition: Swiss Re
Publication: “Reale Fantasien Neue Fotografie aus der Schweiz / Real Fantasies New Photography from Switzerland”, ed. Urs Stahel / Thomas Seelig, Format 23×30 cm. Approx. 150 colour illustrations. Essay by Urs Stahel, German / English. Published by Christoph Merian Verlag. xhibition
Artists’ discussions: on Sunday, 19 March and 2 April at 11.30 a.m., in the exhibition “Real Fantasies”, the artists will hold a discussion against the background of their works.
Stories, Histories
Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur
There is much talk of a crisis in photojournalism resulting from the drop in subjective, personal photo essays in magazines and the dominance of television with its ability to provide information rapidly. This forces narrative, in-depth documentary photography to search for new directions in order to make up for the loss of outlets for publication and to be able to assert its own authorship in new and other media, and with different financing. In addition, in recent years a noticeable shift has taken place that embeds the photographic document in other contexts: on the one hand in advertising and fashion (because a nearness to reality was sought in these fields), and on the other hand in art to enable the photographic document to become detached from current events and their speedy distribution and be presented in books and exhibitions with a distinctly slower rate of perception and a conceptual approach. The photographer-authors presented in the exhibition Set 3 are in this sense no longer classic photojournalists. They do not work for newspapers or magazines, nor do they search for iconic images of individuals that mutate today into classics at auctions. It is much more the case that some of them have developed an approach to narrative photography that enables them to elude the pressures of usability-oriented marketing in magazines and newspapers. With the loss of traditional outlets of distribution for photography in recent years, it is worthwhile considering what conclusions and inferences can be drawn for future methods for producing and distributing documentary photography.
Artists and photographers who are active today, such as Takashi Homma, Stephen Wilks and Andreas Gurksy turn to other methods and approaches that were already being practised in the 1970s and 1980s by such well-known figures as Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld and Lewis Baltz. With a socially motivated eye, conceptual tools and a feeling for the unpredictable, these photographers each took a small segment of American culture and made it into their subject. Images that have already been reproduced are the starting point for the photographic works of Rémy Markowitschs and Dennis Adams. For one it was the printed book, for the other the coverage of the abduction of Patricia Hearst in national and international daily newspapers, which served as the source and inspiration for their particular artistic works. While Markowitsch addresses the ethnographic travels of the French cultural philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss forty years later and further interprets them through exposing overlaying images, Adams brings the incompetence and the reluctance of the reporting press to the fore in order to draw a clearly outlined image of the stunning daughter of the American publisher.
Zbigniew Liberas Positives series (2002-2003) closes the circle that began with the reference to the iconifying of reportage images. With the tactics of a guerrilla fighter, the Poland-born artist appropriates photojournalistic classics that for decades have been fixed in the canon of the western writing of photographic history, and over-writes their sad, negative meaning with precisely opposing, namely positive signs.
The diversity of media in new photographic methods of narration and documentation can already be identified in this concise selection. The position of each artist is explained by differentiated motivations and approaches. For photographers doing documentary work, one of the primary tasks is to formulate these basic parameters for their own work and to link them to the ethical, moral and political content that they would like to transport.
Curator of the exhibition is Thomas Seelig.
We are grateful to the Ars Rhenia Stiftung for its support.
Publication: “Stories, Histories Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur”, collection brochure with works from the exhibition. Essay by Thomas Seelig, German / English.
Documentary films: Four documentary films will be shown as accompanying program to the exhibition “Stories, Histories”, Wednesdays at 7.30 p.m.:
29 March 2006, Frozen Angels, 2005 (Director: Eric Black, Frauke Sandig);
12 April 2006: Massaker, 2004 (Directors: Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen);
26 April 2006: Jimmywork, 2004 (Director: Simon Sauvé);
10 May2006: Moskatchka, 2005 (Director: Annett Schütze)
For further information please visit our website www.fotomuseum.ch
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Switzerland
Phone: 41 52 234 10 60
Fax. 41 52 233 60 97
e-mail: fotomuseum@fotomuseum.ch
Opening hours: Tue Sun 11am 6pm / Wed 11am 8pm