Last friday I attended to an interesting presentation about Hans Steiner, the great swiss photographer. It took place in Lausanne at Unil (the university). This presentation was a conclusion on the exhibition hosted by Musée de l’Elysée.
If you still want to have a look on the exhibition, check my previous article about it: https://luxuryactivist.com/?p=1373
We were quite lucky to have during this evening the different people involved on the making of this exhibition.
From Unil:
François Vallotton and Philip Kaenel
From Musée de l’Elysée:
Jean-Christophe Blaser, Manuel Sigrist and Elisa Rusca.
According to François Vallotton, Hans Steiner is a mystery. He was a “photographer without a face”. All his work brought perhaps one of the biggest influence in the swiss photo-reportage and still, he remained completely “under the radar”. Thanks to the rich collection available at the Elysée archives, they were able to make a great research work in order to put together a complete exhibition. In 1989, l’Elysée acquires the Steiner Collection, more than 106,000 negatives. Behind the exhibition that took place until the end of may, they were able to scan more than 100,000 images that are now available for research on a dedicated website: http://www.hanssteiner.ch
Now that the exhibition in Lausanne is over, it will travel around Switzerland (Bern, Winterthour) but also abroad (Germany, Russia…).
Check here an extract of the conference about the exhibition:
According to Jean-Christophe Blaser, Steiner passion for photography is quite premature. Although his studies and his first jobs were quite far away from photography, Mr Blaser believes that Hans Steiner always wanted to become a photographer. He attended a lot of friends and photographers, photo agencies and sportmen. His passion for sports, politics and the society revealed the themes he would explore during his entire career.
The subject that really satelized Hans Steiner to the international level was his exploration of Alpinism and especially the conquest of the Eiger north face. He was the first one to use a plane to make photos of alpinists on mountain tops. Unfortunately Hans Steiner work on the Eiger is linked to a tragic accident of alpinists that tryed to get through the north face without success. Men were killed and the images went all around the world. Check here the video about Steiner and his Eiger work:
Photo-realism or real photos?
LA
