PHOTO:The New Photography-Upheaval and New Beginnings 1970-1990
The exhibition “The New Photography. Upheaval and New Beginnings 1970-1990” focuses on the exploration of new artistic avenues in photography during the 1970s and 1980s, both in Switzerland and internationally. The photography scene was strongly influenced by the general mood of change in contemporary art, where photography came to be used as a pure documentary medium in response to the limited lifespan of performance and conceptual art. On one side were photographers with a practical and commercial training; on the other artistic amateurs.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthaus Zürich Archive
The exhibition “The New Photography. Upheaval and New Beginnings 1970-1990” at Kunsthaus Zürich takes some 30 individual works and editions and uses them to set up a fascinating dialogue between those rival approaches. The end-point of the process is innovation, as photography conquers new realms and shapes the aesthetic of new media. Taking as its starting point the influences of conceptual art, minimalism and pop art of the 1960s in the works of John Hilliard, David Hockney, Stephen Shore and Dan Graham along with Urs Lüthi, Dieter Meier and Fischli/Weiss, the exhibition includes works by early Swiss practitioners of artistic photography such as Balthasar Burkhard, Hans Danuser, Felix Stephan Huber, Beat Streuli, Hannah Villiger, Bernard Voïta and Cécile Wick. Also represented are feminist and socially critical positions such as Alexis Hunter and Marilyn Minter; the Bohemian photographs of Walter Pfeiffer; body studies by Simone Kappeler; and interiors from the intimacy of Annelies Štrba to the deserted public spaces of Candida Höfer. Topics include “From conceptual photography to media art”, “Photographic explorations of the self” and “Spaces/non-spaces of society”. They reflect a trend that encompasses every level – from production, through dissemination, to reception by an audience that, thanks to advances in technology, was now increasingly able to take its own photographs or obtain (moving) images quickly and cheaply. With the closure of the influential magazine “Life” in the early 1970s, photography lost some of its status as a news medium and instead began carving out a position for itself in art. Photo books and exhibitions were rediscovered as primary channels for presenting photographic works. Photo galleries opened up, and a growing number of art museums incorporated photography into their programmes. Several internationally important photographic book publishers were set up in Switzerland, including Lars Müller (Baden), Edition Patrick Frey and Der Alltag (both in Zurich), which published the art magazine Parkett from 1984 onwards and later became part of the photography publisher Scalo. With their novel forms of publication, they ensured that contemporary Swiss photography gained international recognition.
Info: Curator: Joachim Sieber, Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz 1, Zurich, Duration: 15/11/19-9/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-sun 10:00-18:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-20:00, www.kunsthaus.ch
