The older of the two sons of Werner Bischof (1916-1954), Marco, is the curator of the late Swiss photographer’s estate. Some time ago, for the first time, he began looking more closely at boxes from the 1940s that contained hundreds of glass-plate negatives. Somewhat oddly, he found three seemingly identical negatives of each image. He was able to solve the mystery with the help of experts on the history of photographic technology and restoration. These were colour photographs that Werner Bischof had taken somewhere between 1939 and 1949 using a Devin Tri-Color Camera – both in the studio and during trips through post-war Europe.
This elaborate colour-separation device exposed three monochrome plates in a single exposure, each of them equipped with a colour filter so that a true colour print was subsequently made by addition of the three monochrome negatives.
Some 200 of those Devin Tri-Color Camera negatives have been restored. For the first time, a selection of roughly 100 of those photographs are being published in the catalogue Werner Bischof: Unseen Colour (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de) and presented at the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI) in Lugano in the homonymous exhibition from February 12 until July 2, 2023. Both the book and the show are supplemented by other unpublished colour images that the Magnum photographer took using conventional colour film and standard medium-format and 35 mm cameras.
Werner Bischof is best known for his impressive black-and-white images, most of which were taken on expeditions as a reporter in postwar Europe and during the Indochina War as well as on his travels in the Far East and South America. Far too little known are the Swiss photographer’s early colour photographs, comprising studio work in fashion and advertising photography as well as reportage from war-damaged European cities. For these, Bischof used various types of camera, including a Devin Tricolour.
Even these early colour images reveal Bischof’s outstanding, sensitive aesthetic that characterises his entire oeuvre. In addition to the reproduction of the colour photographs shown in Lugano, the exhibition catalogue contains four essays. Tobia Bezzola, the director of the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, contributes one on experiments in colour photography. The French photography historian Clara Bouveresse writes about Werner Bischof’s commercial constraints and artistic ambitions regarding the use of colour photographs by the Magnum agency. The director of the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur Peter Pfrunder contributes an essay on “painful colour”. The director of the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey Luc Debraine explores the field of colour and technology.
In his essay about experiments in colour photogarphy, Tobia Bezzola mentions that, in 1962, eight years after Werner Bischof had died, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held its first monographic exhibition exclusively featuring colour photography. This show, at the institution that globally defined the photographic canon, was devoted to Bischof ’s friend and colleague Ernst Haas (1921–1986).
Alongside Ernst Haas, the work of Saul Leiter (1923–2013) and Evelyn Hofer (1922–2009) in the New York scene represents the first self-confident emphasis on colour in artistically ambitious photography by the generation of photographers born around 1920, all according to Tobia Bezzola.
In Europe, colour was expected to play a decisive role within Subjective Photography, the most important and stylistically influential avant-garde movement of the late 1950s. Tobia Bezzola notes that Subjective Photography had been founded by Otto Steinert. In Switzerland, Kurt Blum (1922–2005), René Groebli (b. 1927) and Werner Bischof ’s former assistant Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), most famous for his photographs of Alberto Giacometti, as well as Suzanne Hausammann (1925–2007) and Ernst Heiniger (1909–1993) recognised the value of colour photography beyond the realm of advertising and photojournalism, and vigorously pushed its boundaries.
Tobia Bezzola explains the several widespread reasons behind the early avant-garde’s disdain for colour photography and its limitations. Regarding the Devin Tri-Color work by Werner Bischof, he notes that the Swiss photographers work resulted in the occasional powerful abstract, geometric or biomorphic composition; abstract and ornamental still life; and – in one unique case – experimental nude photography. Their technical and formal quality are all the more surprising given that these pictures are little more than episodic capricci in Werner Bischof’s oeuvre. Tobia Bezzola locates the artistic heart of Werner Bischof’s colour photography in the medium-format 6 x 6 cm Rolleiflex single-reflex camera. With its magnifying glass and grid-enhanced shaft viewfinder, it offered the best chance of creating images that were spontaneous and dynamic yet whose composition could be precisely balanced at any time.
Tobia Bezzola underlines that this was the vocabulary of a form of colour photography that dreamily alienates us from the world or laconically reflects it, and in which colour itself is both a theme and a conveyor of mood. It integrated a methodical approach that photographers such as William Eggleston and Luigi Ghirri would elaborate upon in the following decades.
Werner Bischof died young. Therefore, his oeuvre as a whole, but especially his colour oeuvre, is a vigorous and brilliant incomplete chapter. Tobia Bezzola stresses that a panorama of technical and aesthetic possibilities are explored in it, from the spirited and lurid to soft watercolour qualities, from rococo playfulness to the aggression of Pop Art – all in accordance with the respective subject matter and material. Werner Bischof, who was so skilled in applying the technical possibilities of black-and-white to tease out the maximum aesthetic and narrative expression, was prevented from pursuing these paths further.
These are just a few details from a valuable book about early colour photography. Read more in: Werner Bischof: Unseen Colour, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023, 180 pages with many illustrations. Order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
Don’t forget to visit the exhibition Werner Bischof: Unseen Colour at the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI) in Lugano from February 12 until July 2, 2023. The exhibition will subsequently travel to Fotostiftung Schweiz Winterthur, where it will be shown from August 26, 2023 until January 21, 2024 [update added on January 16, 2024: the Fotostiftung exhibition will last until January 28, 2024].
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book / catalogue / exhibition review of Werner Bischof: Unseen Colour are not always put between quotation marks.
Book / Catalogue /Exhibition review about Werner Bischof’s color photographs added on March 17, 2023 at 10:33 Swiss time.
