Peter Pfrunder - Böcker

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.

Back in 2013, Swiss filmmaker Iwan Schumacher began collecting photographs of couples who seem oblivious to the camera, either because they’re on familiar terms with the photographer or don’t even realize they’re being observed. Coincidentally, Peter Pfrunder, director of the Swiss Foundation for Photography, had long envisioned putting together an exhibition of photographs of couples. So it was only natural for the two of them to team up to produce a book.
 
The couples portrayed in Paare / Couples are of various types, durations and gender combinations. Each picture is complete unto itself and shows something happening between the two subjects; each sets a different film in motion in the viewer’s imagination, a before and after, which nevertheless remain a matter of delightful speculation – the mystery of the image remains forever veiled. Although Paare / Couples gives visible, almost palpable expression to a wide range of human emotions, the book doesn’t claim to show a photo-historically representative selection of people from all walks of life. It is, instead, a score gleefully and liberally composed by two photophiles, an eclectic assortment of stills that seem to be drawn from as many different motion pictures, but can be spliced together to form a new multi-threaded mosaic film.