Tag: Werner Bischof

Werner Bischof: Photographer, Artist, Witness

Creative image-maker, engaged photojournalist and poetic storyteller: the current exhibition at the Ernst Leitz Museum is presenting the full scope of Magnum photographer Werner Bischof’s (1916–1954) oeuvre. Despite his early death in a car accident in the Andes, when he was just 38, the precision of his compositions and the emotional aesthetics of his imagery have made Bischof one of the most important Swiss photographers of the 20th century. The selection shows his way from solitary studio photographer to international photojournalist, driven by the magnitude of world events.

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We might as well admit now that photographs don’t tell stories the way words do it. Words tell stories very, very slowly. You need to read them one at a time, and the story then slowly builds. A photograph, in contrast, is not the equivalent of one word. If we stay with Soth’s phrase, a photograph is “a minute fragment of an experience, but quite a precise, detailed, and telling fragment.” Thus looking at one photograph after another would be to read a novel by somehow taking in larger chunks of pages at a time