Roger Humbert – Images to Engage the Mind

The work of Roger Humbert (1929–2022) positions him as a pioneer of Swiss photography. Humbert’s guiding principle, “I photograph light”, substantiates his artistic exploration of the interplay between subject and object, materiality and consciousness, and thus physics and metaphysics. He produced the majority of his photographs “to engage the mind” in the solitude of the darkroom at night. In non-repeatable ways, this artist played with stencils, which served him as pre-digital image generators, resulting in unique photograms and luminograms. In the 1960s, together with René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, he established ‘concrete photography’, a movement still well-known today.

The exhibition presents an overview of Humbert’s oeuvre, much of which has been housed at Fotostiftung Schweiz since 2007. Not only camera-less photographs are on display, but also series in which he documented the world of objects. At the age of 90, Humbert was still enthusiastically investigating digital methods of capturing light. The juxtaposition of this late work with his early analogue light experiments visualises Humbert’s ambitions and demonstrates an intertwining of independent artwork with the day-to-day business of a photographer in the applied domain, who ran a successful studio in Basel.
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