WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND.- Fotomuseum Winterthum presents Stories, Histories – Set 3 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, on view through November 5, 2006. There is much talk of a crisis in photojournalism resulting from the drop in subjective, personal photo essays in magazines and the dominance of television with its ability to provide information rapidly. This forces narrative, in-depth documentary photography to search for new directions in order to make up for the loss of outlets for publication and to be able to assert its own authorship in new and other media, and with different financing. In addition, in recent years a noticeable shift has taken place that embeds the photographic document in other contexts: on the one hand in advertising and fashion (because a nearness to reality was sought in these fields), and on the other hand in art to enable the photographic document to become detached from current events and their speedy distribution and be presented in books and exhibitions with a distinctly slower rate of perception and a conceptual approach. The photographer-authors presented in the exhibition “Set 3” are in this sense no longer classic photojournalists. They do not work for newspapers or magazines, nor do they search for iconic images of individuals that mutate today into classics at auctions. It is much more the case that some of them have developed an approach to narrative photography that enables them to elude the pressures of usability-oriented marketing in magazines and newspapers. With the loss of traditional outlets of distribution for photography in recent years, it is worthwhile considering what conclusions and inferences can be drawn for future methods for producing and distributing documentary photography.

Artists and photographers who are active today, such as Takashi Homma, Stephen Wilks and Andreas Gurksy turn to other methods and approaches that were already being practised in the 1970s and 1980s by such well-known figures as Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld and Lewis Baltz. With a socially motivated eye, conceptual tools and a feeling for the unpredictable, these photographers each took a small segment of American culture and made it into their subject. Images that have already been reproduced are the starting point for the photographic works of Rémy Markowitschs and Dennis Adams. For one it was the printed book, for the other the coverage of the abduction of Patricia Hearst in national and international daily newspapers, which served as the source and inspiration for their particular artistic works. While Markowitsch addresses the ethnographic travels of the French cultural philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss forty years later and further interprets them through exposing overlaying images, Adams brings the incompetence and the reluctance of the reporting press to the fore in order to draw a clearly outlined image of the stunning daughter of the American publisher.

Zbigniew Libera’s “Positives” series (2002-2003) closes the circle that began with the reference to the iconifying of reportage images. With the tactics of a guerrilla fighter, the Poland-born artist appropriates photojournalistic classics that for decades have been fixed in the canon of the western writing of photographic history, and “over-writes” their sad, negative meaning with precisely opposing, namely positive signs.

The diversity of media in new photographic methods of narration and documentation can already be identified in this concise selection. The position of each artist is explained by differentiated motivations and approaches. For photographers doing documentary work, one of the primary tasks is to formulate these basic parameters for their own work and to link them to the ethical, moral and political content that they would like to transport.