Peter Pfrunder – författare

Switzerland's image has been significantly shaped by photographs dedicated to tourism. Through spectacular mountain panoramas, snapshots of rural idylls, or portraits of local people, the country could be successfully marketed, and these photographs also made an important contribution to- ward national identity. Another consequence, however, was that the respective pictorial repertoire became inflated and stereotyped. For this publication and for an exhibition of the same name opening in 2017, five internationally renowned photographers were invited to scrutinize Switzerland in their capacity as independent, subjective, and sensitive observers-unrestricted by any advertising commission. What Alinka Echeverri a (Mexiko/UK), Shane Lavalette (USA), Eva Leitolf (Germany), Simon Roberts (UK), and Zhang Xiao (China) discovered on their travels around the country or along its borders is both inspiring and revealing. Their exciting, poetic, or mysterious-enigmatic im- ages invite viewers to see the familiar with the eyes of an outsider.6 booklets in a slipcase

A doomed painter on his last walk, a barefoot girl in front of a school blackboard, a charismatic politician as an advocate for the simple life: 99 Photographs presents images that touch, seduce or confuse. Since 1971 the Fotostiftung Schweiz has been collecting archives of photographers and outstanding works of photographic history. Now its 50th anniversary gives rise to a curated look at this collection – an invitation to discover the rich language of photography and to see the world through different eyes. Well-known icons stand next to unknown trouvailles, pioneers of color photography next to Netcam photographers. The short accompanying texts point to a reality that lies behind the facts and beneath the surface. Ninety-nine times, editor Peter Pfrunder stops time to look inward and outward at once – until the invisible emerges in the visible and images turn out to be a wondrous mixture of facts and fantasies.

Transformation processes are the focus of Georg Aerni’s new photographs. The Swiss photographer and artist shows plastic greenhouses that have annexed whole swathes of land for agricultural mass production, residential houses that have been built overnight on the city outskirts without construction machines and literally noiselessly. He points his lens at olive trees that have grown over centuries into figures full of character, at creepers that conquer leftover spaces between high-rises and motorways, and at mighty rock faces that are being gnawed by erosion. With the merging of art and documentation that is typical of Aerni’s work, Georg Aerni—Silent Transition makes the signs of change the object of a contemplative observation and at the same time asks challenging questions: about our handling of natural resources, about the social backgrounds to cities growing out of control, about the regenerative force of nature.A decade after Aerni’s first monograph, Sites & Signs, this new book showcases the artist’s ongoing continuation of his photographic work through numerous individual images as well as new series. 166 beautiful colour and black-and-white plates are introduced through texts by Peter Pfrunder and Nadine Olonetzky and commented on with an essay by Sabine von Fischer.Text in English and German.