A view from his camera: unknown photos of Werner Bischof

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Lugano’s colors shine – the lake is blue, the mountains are green, the facades of the houses are red and yellow. It’s as if the outside air has harmonized with the art inside the MASI Lugano Art Museum. The new exhibition is called “Invisible Colors” and its name suggests what it shows: Color photographs of Swiss photographer Werner Bischof (1916-1954) are shown to the public for the first time. Photos that have been in the archive for more than 80 years, produced in an extremely complex way, and allow us to better understand the life of the famous photographer.

The last Marco Bischof (73) found the pictures and studied them. The negatives were exposed on small glass plates, as his father used a bulky Devin Tricolor camera to take the pictures. “Until now, I have always had great respect for touching these little glass negatives,” says Marco Bischof. “If one breaks, the image is lost.”

Yet he dared to look at the pictures and saw that for each motif there were three identical pictures. This is because a tricolor camera takes three different negatives of an image. One negative each for one of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow. If you then overlay all three images, the result is a color photograph. Our modern printers work according to the same system.

Colors of Europe and Asia

After five years of development and restoration, Marco Bischof can now tour the exhibition. The “Invisible Colors” exhibition begins with a timeline showing the life of Werner Bischof. In addition to the dates and descriptions, there are also chronological photographs showing Werner: in the portrait as a young man, as a student in his studio, as a photojournalist waving from a cockpit, or most recently in the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. surrounded by locals, all smiling at the camera. The photographer’s entire life hangs on a three-metre-tall wall, offering an intimate glimpse into his private space. Marco Bischof looks at his timeline. Marco was four years old when his father died in an accident in the Peruvian Andes. “If I do the math, I only saw my father for five months,” he says. She got to know her father through letters, diaries and photographs.

Werner Bischof was born in Kilchberg ZH, the son of a merchant. He went to the teachers’ college Schiers GR to become an art and sports teacher. But the same thing happened to many students: he didn’t like it, so he moved to the Zurich School of Applied Arts, where he joined Hans Fischler and Alfred Willimann’s photography class. Fascinated by art, Bischof went to Paris in 1939, where he worked as a graphic designer and advertising photographer. When World War II broke out, Werner Bischof was enlisted by the federal government to serve in the army.

While bombs were falling on Europe, Bischof was stranded in his Zurich studio and devoted himself to photographing natural motifs. Many of the advertising posters and color photographs that can be seen in the exhibition were made during this period. Meanwhile, Bischof played a lot with colors and compositions that were ahead of his time.

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The famous black-and-white photographs Bischof published in the magazine date from that period. But as the exhibit shows, he not only had his trusty Leica in his suitcase, but also the Devin Tricolor camera. He photographed devastated Berlin in color and also captured scenes from troubled countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Italy. He painted all the misery with his photographs with a colorful paint and that way only made it scarier.

A year after Marcos’ birth (1950), Bischof traveled to Asia, where he reported on the famine in Bihar, India and the Indochina War. He was so impressed with Japan that he quickly extended his stay and turned a few months into a year. He captured the colorful life of culture with his photographs.

“My father was a wandering spirit, he always wanted to explore and see new things,” says Marco Bischof. “He was a huge perfectionist,” he adds with a smile, explaining that Werner Bischof always sketched what he wanted to photograph first so that the picture was taken perfectly. The urge to travel eventually brought Werner Bischof to Peru, where he died in a car accident on May 16, 1954. He took the last picture of a boy playing the flute in Peru: “On the road to Cuzco, near Pisac, Valle Sagrado”.

“Invisible Colors” can be seen at the Museo d’arte in Lugano until 16 July 2023.

Source : Blick