Ernst Scheidegger Rediscovered

To mark the centennial of Ernst Scheidegger's birth, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the MASI Lugano are honoring the former Magnum photographer. The pictures emphasize Scheidegger's important place in the history of Swiss photography of the postwar years.

Stowed away in his home on Zeltweg in Zurich, Ernst Scheidegger kept a large cardboard box. Having brought it back with him from Paris in 1956, he left it unopened for nearly sixty years. Hidden inside it were around a hundred photos, all of them prints that Scheidegger’s Magnum friends and colleagues had given him in exchange for images of his own in the early 1950s. This collection of raw copies, offprints, archive copies, and exhibition prints by Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ernst Haas, George Rodger, Ruth Orkin, and David Seymour was more than just a time capsule or hoard of memorabilia; for sealed within it, in a certain sense, was Scheidegger’s own aborted career as a photojournalist and reporter. That trajectory’s abrupt end had to do with two traumatic events in the spring of 1954. On May 16 his friend and mentor Werner Bischof died in a car crash in the Peruvian Andes, and just nine days later, Robert Capa was killed when he stepped on a land mine near Thái Bình in Vietnam. Magnum had originally selected Scheidegger for the Indochina assignment and had accredited him accordingly. But as Scheidegger, being Swiss, was the only one able to obtain a visa in time to cover a state visit in Egypt, Capa agreed to take his place, duly packing his bags and setting off for Vietnam, despite having previously sworn that he was finished with war.

So devastated was Scheidegger by these two tragic deaths that he was barely able to speak of them at all; and since he could no longer bear to work as a photojournalist for Magnum, he took up a position as a lecturer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm instead. Scheidegger’s early work as a photographer thus ended in 1956. While he would certainly remain true to photography his whole life, it would be a very different kind of photography that he henceforth pursued.

Aesthetic turn

Producing images for other purposes and in other contexts had the effect of changing his visual language and style. Recalling his apprenticeship with Hans Finsler and Alfred Willimann at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (Zurich School of Arts and Crafts) he would henceforth embed his photographic work in an overarching concept of visual design. True to the Bauhaus tradition, this encompassed not just architectural photography, object photography, and commercial photography, but also graphic design, exhibition design, book design, newspaper layouting, and commercial and documentary filmmaking.

And just as he had locked away the works of his fellow photographers at Magnum, so Scheidegger now archived his own images of the years 1945 to 1955, only very occasionally allowing one or the other of them to be included in a book or exhibition. The sixty or so photographs from that early phase of Scheidegger’s career selected for this publication are therefore seeing the light of day for the first time. What makes them so arresting is not just their evident quality, but also their affirmation and elucidation of Scheidegger’s place in the postwar history of Swiss photography. After all, he earned his spurs as a photographer just when there were signs of a new trend emerging.

Gotthard Schuh, whom Scheidegger would succeed as image editor at the NZZ as of 1960, had been the first leading Swiss photographer to express disquiet at what was happening back in the mid-1930s. The forms that had made the “New Seeing” or “New Photography” of the interwar years seem an integral part of the international avant-garde were ossifying and becoming clichéd, he complained. While conceding the importance of the schooling in “immediacy” and “precision” that had kept photography within the ambit of Constructivism and the Bauhaus during the 1920s, he felt that capturing “the whole of life in all its many facets [ … ] with intensity and spontaneity” now called for a new, more expressive, and existential sense of urgency. 

By the late 1940s, both Schuh and Jakob Tuggener, and in the younger generation René Groebli and Robert Frank, were themselves exemplifying this aesthetic turn within the elite of Swiss photography. The upbeat mood and faith in technology of early 1930s Constructivism now seemed superficial and naive given the catastrophic experience of World War II and its aftermath. What emerged in its wake was an introspective, existentialist, often darkly subjective auteur photography, which through close observation sought to tease out the truth in the things of everyday life and to produce poetic distillations and staged renditions of that truth. That the 1955 exhibition by the Kollegium Schweizerischer Photographen at Helmhaus Zürich showcasing the new style and its protagonists was given the programmatic title Photographie als Ausdruck (Photography as Expression) was therefore only logical.

Photographic flâneur

This also delineates the stylistic context of Scheidegger’s early photographs of Switzerland, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. The language they speak is very different from the light, elegantly calculated, and clear compositions that made his later images so famous. Their nonchalant focus, graininess, sharp contrasts, motion blur, risky under- and over-exposure, distorted perspectives, and cut-off motifs all tell us that these are the works of a young photographer who is not afraid to radically unlearn everything that he has just learned during his training.

The world that he shows us is never truly light, and if it is light, then it is dazzlingly over-exposed. The harshly drawn motifs assemble many of the topoi of the Neorealist cinema and photography of the postwar decades: the flickering spotlights on the faces of the circus clowns and artistes, the shabby sensationalism of the fairground, the noisy bustle of street life in southern European cities, the street urchins, the Salvation Army, the feast days and festivals, and the noisy demonstrations by striking workers. They are poetic depictions of everyday life quietly observed by a photographic flaneur with a social conscience.

Hence the unpretentious portrayals of juvenile prisons and orphanages, of Hornusser festivals and cattle markets, of down-at-heel dancing schools and abandoned shipyards—all of them seemingly incidental and rather gloomy and ponderous in tenor. And what they reveal to us, like the postwar photojournalism of Werner Bischof, is the shock and sense of latent menace that travelers from sheltered, unscathed Switzerland experienced every time they ventured into the wasteland of war-torn Europe across the border. It was likewise during those first postwar years that Scheidegger paid a spontaneous private visit to an artist in Paris, whom quite by chance he had gotten to know while on active duty in the Engadine in 1943. It was there, at Alberto Giacometti’s studio in Montparnasse, that Scheidegger shot his first series of portraits of the Swiss sculptor, and so planted a seed that would germinate and thrive, and years later, in a completely different setting and with very different goals in mind, blossom in profusion.

With just a few exceptions, the artist portraits that Scheidegger began producing in the mid-1950s were all commissions: initially for art journals such as Cahiers d’art, Verve, or Du, and often for book projects by Peter Schifferli’s Arche-Verlag and later Scheidegger’s own publishing house. The Galerie Maeght in Paris with its ambitious publications program would also become an important client. Projects for the weekend supplement of the NZZ, for various international weeklies, and for exhibition catalogs for museums would follow. Later he would do important work for Swiss television, and it was there that the artist portrait crystallized out as his true forte—the photographic discipline that afforded him his perhaps most fruitful and certainly most amenable niche.

The diverse situations in which the portraits were created as well as the varying degrees of intimacy and friendship connecting Scheidegger to his subjects make for stylistic variety and many different methods of visualization. The portraits show him combining the graphic, abstract eye of his formalistic apprenticeship with Finsler with his own penchant for the expressively anecdotal detail that featured so strongly in his early poetic phase, and then complementing this stylistic repertoire with the soberly precise, pathos-free, factual reporting of a true photojournalist. To attempt to deduce any formula from this would be futile. What can be asserted is that his most successful images are those that are steeped in the time, place, and circumstances of the encounter, all of which remain visible within it. Not that it was always the much vaunted, catalytic proximity of photographer and artist that inspired the work in every case. On the contrary, far from denying the fact that many of the portraits were commissions, Scheidegger openly acknowledges as much, and in his images of Cuno Amiet, Le Corbusier, and Oskar Kokoschka, especially, visibly respects the fleeting quality of his contact with them by maintaining a decorous distance.

Renouncing chatter

Never are the photographs obsequious, nor do they ever insinuate intimacy. But in those cases where a working relationship or even a friendship had already engendered a certain familiarity, as in the case of Max Bill, Varlin, and, famously, Alberto Giacometti, Scheidegger allows that closeness to shine through in both the intimacy of his gaze and the private character of the narrative, though without ever descending into gossip.

Artists often produce self-portraits and hence tend to be good at staging themselves and at setting traps for other portraitists—traps which Scheidegger was good at sidestepping. What his artist portraits indicate most of all, and what makes them so enduringly inspiring, is his sensitivity. He always deployed his camera tactfully—even respecting his subject’s wish to stage himself as he would like to be seen and embracing that pose as part of his own work. The modesty or even tawdriness of the artist’s personal circumstances are neither retouched nor over-dramatized. Similarly, that whiff of playful irony with which Scheidegger confronts a self-aggrandizing poseur like Salvador Dalí tells not only of his goodwill and solidarity, but also of his recognition of the years and years of hard toil concealed behind the flamboyant play-acting. The spectacular dramatizations and highly original slants with which Philippe Halsman and later Irving Penn and Richard Avedon caused such a furor as portraitists of artists during that same period were always alien to Scheidegger. He never had a signature style, nor did he present his subjects as heroic, glamorous geniuses, gloriously detached from their humdrum habitats. Scheidegger’s artist is almost always an artifex, a craftsman surrounded by the tools of his trade—all those palette knives, burins, tubes of paint, rags, soldering irons, sacks of plaster, and bottles of turpentine; he is always one who makes things with his hands, who at this very minute is laboring away at his drawing board or easel, in a studio, in a warehouse, at a litho press, or in a foundry.

There are hardly any solemn portraits of subjects in their Sunday best; on the contrary, Scheidegger almost always shows them at work, doing what they always do. He had no time for private views, cocktail parties, awards ceremonies, and all those other events that the art business holds dear; he may well have been present at them, of course, but not with his camera. That same refusal to engage in gossip, that deliberate deployment of his camera only in that moment when it was most wanted and most urgently needed, when it promised to explain, illuminate, enlarge upon, or help publicize a work and the circumstances of its creation, is also the key to the self-assured nonchalance of the works themselves. These photographs do not have to draw attention to themselves since they were made in the service of a larger project.

Scheidegger’s photographic stories from the artists’ studios of the second half of the twentieth century are the work of an individual who basically shared his protagonists’ mission, and who therefore understood his images as a joint undertaking. He was always a publisher, author, graphic artist, gallerist, filmmaker, exhibition-maker, and catalog designer who just happened to be adept with a camera. “Photo art” as such was never his aim, and doubtless that is why even today, these photographs still have so much to say.