The oeuvre of Henriette Grindat (1923–1986) occupies a special position in the history of Swiss photography. In the 1950s, while many of her colleagues represented an objective style and were producing committed reportage for high-circulation magazines, Grindat developed a very subjective visual language that was influenced by surrealism. Her artistic expressiveness can be compared to that of modernist Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener (1904–1988). However, her name is still little known – especially in German-speaking Switzerland. Grindat’s estate is housed at Fotostiftung Schweiz, where it has been comprehensively critically incorporated and was presented in a 2008 retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a publication. Henriette Grindat would have turned 100 on the 3rd of July 2023. Fotostiftung Schweiz is taking this centenary as an opportunity to shed light on an important body of work by this photographer, which she realised together with writers Albert Camus and René Char.

After her training at Gertrude Fehr’s photography school in Lausanne and Vevey, Henriette Grindat sought exchanges with artists and literary figures – sometimes also in Paris. There, she met her future husband in 1949, Swiss etcher Albert-Edgar Yersin (1905–1984), and became acquainted with French poet René Char (1907–1988), whose texts she admired. Char had been in the surrealists’ extended milieu during the 1930s and had fought in the resistance as a maquisard during the Second World War. His background in the resistance is something he had in common with author Albert Camus (1913–1960). From 1946 onwards, these two writers were united by friendship and their love of the Vaucluse region in Provence. Char was from L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a small town east of Avignon, where he took up residence after the war; Camus would sometimes rent a country house in the area.

La Postérité du soleil
Impressed by Grindat’s pictures, they devised a plan to use photographs and texts to reproduce the mood of that landscape, which evidently reminded Camus of his homeland in Algeria. In 1950, Henriette Grindat went on excursions in and around L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, accompanied by Char. She photographed intuitively, scanning the surfaces of vegetation, topography and buildings, finding quiet scenes that seemed to detach themselves from the time and place. In 1952, Camus wrote short poetic paragraphs about 30 of her photographs, reflecting on the subtlest of details. The interplay is extraordinary: The language evolves out of the images and opens up a new dimension within them. Nevertheless, no publisher could be found for this collaborative work at first, which was entitled La Postérité du soleil (The Posterity of the Sun). It was only after the death of Camus in 1960 that interest in the unpublished work arose. In 1965, Geneva-based publisher Edwin Engelberts produced a large-format portfolio containing gelatin silver prints of Grindat’s photographs, along with Camus’s texts and a foreword by Char. La Postérité du soleil did not appear as a book until 1986, the year in which Henriette Grindat took her own life and two years before René Char’s death.

The portfolio sheets from 1965 are on display in this exhibition, for which the original accompanying French texts by Albert Camus have been comprehensively translated into German for the first time.