Jakob Tuggener: Photographs 1926-56

Jakob Tuggener, born in 1904, is a pioneer of twentieth-century Swiss photography. Unlike other photographers of his generation in Switzerland, he always saw himself as an artist and his photographs and films, like his paintings, as art. His photographic oeuvre is unique in that its core consists of over seventy book maquettes with original photographs intended for publication. However, only one of them was actually printed, the Fabrik of 1943. Drawing mainly on material from his estate that was left intact after his death in 1988, Tuggener's photographic work is presented here for the first time. Based on the analysis of his early work of the late 1920s, his student work made under the influence of the "New Vision" aesthetics in Berlin in 1930-31, and the magazine work done in Switzerland until the out-break of World War II, the main book maquettes of 1942-56 are discussed in relation to Tuggener's three major thematic concerns. They are technology and industry, rural life in Switzerland, and high society events such as New Year's Eve balls and carnival parties. Tuggener's oeuvre is seen in photo historical and aesthetic terms. It was formed in the area of conflict between modernist ideas and increasing conservatism during the 1930s, related to the cinematic concept of montage, and was instrumental in the formation of post-war New Swiss Photography occurring parallel to the "Subjektive Fotografie" movement in Germany. The oeuvre is also put into the socio-cultural and political context ranging from the wide-spread enthusiasm for speed and technological progress during the 1930s, to Switzerland's physical and spiritual isolation during the war, and to the revival of the Swiss economy and of social life in the early 1950s. Together with a discussion of Tuggener's theories of art and photography, this project offers differentiated views of both Tuggener as a paradigmatic artist working in Switzerland and his photographic oeuvre as a personal, expressive documentation of a changing Swiss society. An extensive appendix includes a first biographical chronology as well as an exhibition chronology, lists of his major magazine reportages and his films.