Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting the first retrospective dedicated to the US-American photographer Helen Levitt and brings together her extensive body of work with her archive, which has only recently become accessible to the public. Across thematic chapters, the exhibition offers a broader perspective on a photographer who is still known above all for her photographs […]
With her highly original and at times provocative practice, Viviane Sassen is one of Europe’s most exciting photographers. In and Out of Fashion is the first full retrospective of her fashion work, showing a selection of more than 300 photographs from the past seventeen years. Sassen is celebrated for breaking free from many of the […]
Robert Adams – The Place We Live is a major retrospective by America’s foremost living landscape photographer. Featuring around 240 works spanning Adams’s 45-year career, the exhibition casts a forensic eye over the rapidly changing geography of the American West. On the one hand, the photographer’s pictures reveal mankind’s increasingly tragic relationship with the natural […]
Deposit – Yann Mingard
Fotomuseum Winterthur
08.03.-25.05.2014
How does our secular society manage its heritage and, with that, its future? By collecting and archiving data with near-religious zeal: human DNA in the form of slivers of umbilical cord, dental samples and sperm, DNA of animals already extinct in the wild, the seeds of all manner of (agricultural) plants. And, of course, vast quantities of digital data that we leave behind on the big data pathways of the internet, credit card statements and official registers. From 2009 to 2013, Swiss photographer Yann Mingard (*1973) documented this avid pursuit of collection and storage in images that raise many of the unasked but pressing questions of our time.
James Welling – Autograph
Fotomuseum Winterthur
30.11.2013-16.02.2014
James Welling (*1951) is an artist whose work occupies the grey areas between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography. For over 40 years his work has addressed the theme of representation and abstraction in the visual image. By critics, artists, and collectors alike he is considered a central figure in international contemporary photography. In addition to presenting Welling’s documentary oriented work, which follows the tradition of classical artistic photography, as exemplified by the work of Paul Strand, the exhibition Autograph also includes his abstract photograms, which recall works by avant-garde artists, such as Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, and Man Ray.
Lewis Hine – Photography for a Change
Fotomuseum Winterthur
08.06.-25.08.2013
The American photographer, sociologist, and teacher Lewis Hine considered his work a means of promoting a better world. Hine ardently wished that Americans would become conscious of the injustice of American labor laws.
Concrete – Photography and Architecture
Fotomuseum Winterthur
March 2 – May 20, 2013
What ideologies live in a single family home? How do settlements grow into cities? Why is the interrelation between life and work in Zurich and Winterthur different from that in Shanghai? How can sculptural high-rises and living spaces be translated into the two-dimensional world of photography?
Amar Kanwar – Evidence
Fotomuseum Winterthur
08.09.-18.11.2012
Two pivotal events in 1984 impacted Amar Kanwar’s early years as a student. One was the orchestrated killings of Sikhs in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October 1984. The other was the Bhopal disaster on 3 December of the same year, when toxic gas escaped from a pesticide plant owned by the American company Union Carbide, killing several thousand people and injuring hundreds of thousands more.
Yto Barrada – Riffs
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Swiss
01.12.2012-17.02.2013
Yto Barrada – Riffs is the first large-scale museum exhibition by the French-Moroccan artist. In 2011 she was selected by Deutsche Bank as “Artist of the Year” 2011. The award includes an exhibition made possible by the financial institution, which was presented at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin followed by stops in Brussels, Chicago, Birmingham, and Rome, and which can now be seen at Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Diane Arbus
Fotomuseum Winterthur
03.03.-28.05.2012
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.
CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky
Fotomuseum Winterthur
26.11.2011-12.02.2012
The English pharmacist and meteorologist Luke Howard wrote in 1802 in the preface to his manuscript On the Modification of Clouds: “Clouds are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which affect all the variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.”
Bernd and Hilla Becher: Mines and Mills – Industrial Landscapes
Fotomuseum Winterthur
26.11.2011-12.02.2012
For more than forty years, the photographer couple Bernd und Hilla Becher (*1931-2007/*1934) worked on creating an inventory of industrial architecture. Warehouses, shaft towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces as well as half-timbered houses are among the subjects they photographed throughout Germany, England, France, Central Europe, and the USA.