Departing homeward The photograph of Lanzerote seems to mark a

Time (2000 - 2006)
Departing homeward
The photograph of Lanzerote seems to mark a frontier ... a frontier which has to be crossed. The foreground of the picture shows a
crossroads. A road sign and white road markings repeat the command to ‚stop‘. Two signposts point in different directions: Mirador del
Rio right, Arrecife left. Straight ahead, the terrain rises gently and opens out. The viewer‘s gaze stretches up into this landscape, past two
indistinct, embedded buildings, rids itself of the restrictions and finds release. Reto Camenisch does not follow the signs to left or right.
His photography plods straight on, leaving civilization behind and, with it, the geometricization and taming of nature into countryside.
These photographs open out, into wide open space, into height and depth, light and darkness, softness and hardness. Camenisch moves
forwards in space and simultaneously backwards on the time axis. He sallies forth into unspoiled landscapes, seeking worlds which merit
the adjective ‚natural‘ because they are barely humanized, ordered, changed, metamorphosed, controlled or exploited, if at all. He seeks
worlds which mark time differently, have different spatial subdivisions, keep a different rhythm - and even sound different.
Reto Camenisch tramps the whole world: steps over to Lanzerote, strides across the Bernese Oberland, hikes through the Engadine,
climbs Kilimanjaro, crosses over the Auvergne, into Brittany, Andalucia, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Cyprus, through the Entlebuch and
Glarnerland to the thousand-year-old cembra pines of the primeval Tamangur forest. He departs from modern tramlines, slips out of the
timeframe of the present, and heads far enough away for the ribcage to expand and for breathing to slow down. Then a different feeling
takes hold. The body yields, tired but relaxed; the heavy 4 x 5“ camera and tripod are laid down, then set up. Reto Camenisch dives in. He
surveys a plain which absorbs and releases vision. His eyes travel up a rock face which rises from its base-plinth and bursts into an abundance of gradations and ledges. These criss-cross the picture, obstructing vision. They are massive, yet finely nuanced into varying shades
of grey. We follow his gaze, down into a valley marked by heavy falls of boulder and scree. What we find is not some grim hellhole. Rather,
it is as if the light and the fog cry out, opening another world in which all rules are reversed. We stand before a dark ridge, shrouded in fog
to the front, and immersed in the silver streaks of the photographic paper to the rear. A colossus of nature towers upwards, as if begging
to be conquered, to be cleared like a blockage in the throat. Our eyes ply over slopes of granite and volcanic scree, penetrate rock formations, watch the interplay of light and shade, plunge into weird forests of scrub, blocking our path like crazy poles, like a wall of spears. We
wander over wild meadows which seem to keep the naked earth warm like a fleece. We pass the cembra pines in their bushy, slow-motion
dance, looking up into the expanse of eternal snow. Gorges draw our gaze down, past the rock face on the left, halted by the one on the
right, and on along our imaginary path. Then the world opens out before us, and our eyes travel out to sea, resting only on the horizon.
They glide over rock formations, over expanses of water, observing the spray of a storm, following trails in the rock. These are the marks
left by time, wind and water, the traces of the elements precipitated. The surfaces across which our eyes move look furry, stubbly, bristly,
sandy or velvety to the touch. The slopes up and down which we clamber seem rough, angular, brittle, scratchy and scaly. This is nature
enfolded, foaming, stitched and patched, the wall before our eyes, the mountain in our sight, the nature in our soul.
Reto Camenisch presents our eyes with large-format, silver-gelatine surfaces, as dense black and white embodiments of his search, his
yearning to go and see. Here clouds, whisps of fog, wild nature‘s perspirations mingle with the process of developing the polaroid negative
on the spot. The patches, streaks, whisps and sprays in the picture make these photographs seem steeped deep in their paper medium.
The Pola edges, the typical stripes, patches, lines and shadows on the edge of black and white polaroid photographs, come across like a
gaze short of sleep, but wakeful yet. They strengthen the sensation that we are witnessing some alchemistic process which defies the puny
bounds of the rational. We behold and enter these images, oblivious of time. They are the fruit of long paths laboriously travelled, of a journey into a genre of land or existence which Reto Camenisch follows so far that community life is lost from sight. Then he takes the plunge,
sinking into the landscape until he breathes with it and adopts its rhythm. The landscape begins to resonate for him as his inner nature
bonds with the nature outside him, in a temporary unity which he had thought lost.
Camenisch‘s photographs are portrayals of experience and desire. We live ‚by the laws of nature‘ in a world where nature has lost its critical authority as a counterbalance to civilization and society. What we see of nature, in all her forms, has always been reshaped by humanity for some purpose or other. Thus, if we see ourselves as part of nature at all, we have robbed ourselves of an essential anchor. Our once
glorified emancipation from nature boomerangs back on us. The freedom we have won melts away before what Gernot Böhme has called
the new „base of an exploited nature“. Reto Camenisch seeks his personal ‚salvation‘. He looks for temporary rest and contemplation
during his search for correspondence between inner nature and the nature outside, for spots on earth which still allow a Rousseau-esque
experience of nature, a unity of ego, place and time ... Camenisch is a man who breaks away to come back, who puts himself out to get
there, to come home.
His photographs visualize his search. They are expressions of the longing for the self-balancing ‚U‘ of communicating vessels, for functional
interchange between subject and object driven by respect and appreciation rather than by dominance. In his vision we, who act, make
nature resonate like a musical instrument. His pictures are contemplative, deep and serious. Their very sombreness quells hilarity. They hint
that these primeval places, where such immersion is possible, will not be there for ever. These remnants of ground will soon be completely pulled from under our feet as the last of nature is changed, harnessed, exhausted. In Hartmut Böhme‘s understanding, the place of
innocence is lost as we (or future generations) have to go through with detachment from nature, to complete our alienation to reconcile
nature and spirit anew.
Reto Camenisch‘s camera shots seem to exude this dualism. Photographically, they mark the trail of his search. They record his memory
of innocence, of being embedded, of being cradled. They are signs of a temporary diversion from the trim lawn of the present. But, pace
Spinoza, they also seem to presage the end of self-shaping, life-giving nature (natura naturans) and the dominance of natura naturata, nature created by humans. 20th-century photography experienced the break with holy nature, marking the end of pictures of an untouched,
unspoiled, pantheistic nature. The holy image of nature of Carlton Watkins, Anselm Adams or Minor White was replaced with the more
realist photography of the topographers, who show how nature is bridled, occupied, used and mastered; how terrain changes into territory.
Examples are the photographs of Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Robert Adams - and there are others. The step they took was crucial, because
it restored landscape photography‘s critical faculties. It repaired its clarity of vision and allowed it to become a contemporary medium of
analysis which seismographically records the current state of relations between people and landscape. The present trend is back to the
landscape photograph as an original picture, as part of foreknowledge, part of submerged nature. Sally Mann, with her pictures of the
overcast American south, or Jitka Hanzlová, with her forest photographs symbolizing the untamed corners of the human psyche, echo the
theme of Reto Camenisch‘s natural sites. They, too, deal with the loss of essentiality, of source, of untrodden ground. They represent the
search for depth, for unity and for wholeness in their photographs. The natural world outside is our benchmark as we review our existential
wrapping and lifeskills. But, as Gernot Böhme writes, inner nature and outside nature have „finally become something which lies before
us. They have become a project.“ This makes the recreation of nature in human terms one of the key political issues of the 21st century.
Reto Camenisch‘s search spawns original images which powerfully remind us of the nature we have lost. We let them resonate with our
own nature, like sounding boards from the depths of space and time.
Urs Stahel | Fotomuseum Winterthur | Switzerland
Triptychon Grimsel
Shira, Kilimanjaro
Barafu, Kilimanjaro
Machame, Kilimanjaro
Errachadia, Marocco
Merzouga, Marocco
Valle Dades, Marocco
Zeit (2000 - 2006)
On The Brink
What seest thou else
In the dark backward and the abysm of time?
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Reto Camenisch has come a long way to
get where he now is. But, in the nature of things, and like most of us, he was already there without wanting to admit it. In fact we carry
this place, this abyss, around with us, and could see it at once, were our gaze only more discerning. Easier said than done, in a world
where image and sound intrude more and more! Amid the hubbub of the market place (jingling ringtones!), we can hardly hear ourselves speak. Assailed by all kinds of stimuli, we lack practical orientation and do not even know it. In perception terms, we risk losing the
ground from under our feet. Reto Camenisch‘s first book BÜRGERBILDER (1993) can still be seen as the product of his work as a portrait
photographer and photojournalist. But by the time of BLUESLAND (1997), many pictures already hinted at a dawning awareness of this
problem. The body of the book consists of 64 black-and-white photographs of the Mississippi Delta reminiscent, paradoxically, of William
Eggleston, the coloured visionary of the southern United States. It is not just the democratic choice of subjects. The photographs are also a
kind of prologue to thirteen of Switzerland, likewise black and white. The first and biggest of these, „Weissenberg, Glarus“, similarly square in shape, is a forerunner of the images in his new book which, devoid of human presence, impress by their peacefulness. That volume
was to be entitled HEIMAT. Black and flecked with snow, the mountain rises from the bottom right-hand corner into a grey sky of moving
cloud accounting for less than ten percent of the picture. This is the spot where, in September 1964, Edmond Camenisch tragically fell to
his death while hunting. His son was six years old at the time, and the event probably marked the boy‘s life more than any other. From
the mid-1920s Alfred Stieglitz used to call his cloud photographs „Equivalents“, explaining that they should be seen „as equivalents of
my deepest experience, my fundamental philosophy, of life.“ „Weissenberg, Glarus“ is Reto Camenisch‘s „Equivalent“. Anchored to the
ground quite a long way off-centre, it still has more in common with the series from two years before, which Stieglitz took with a large-format camera and dubbed „Music - A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs“.
For his new volume, Camenisch again set out on a search
for which, this time, his chosen tempo was ‚andante moderato‘. From his front doorstep, he journeyed to the end of the world. „I travel,
I move from one point to another. No matter how foreign it is, when I get to the place, I am at one with it. It is my h“heimat for brief
moments - sometimes rather longer.“ The ability of this heimat-seeking globetrotter to see anywhere as his home is a transitory thing and,
as such, betrays a certain affinity with Ernst Bloch‘s interpretation of hope in both utopian and nostalgic terms. Bloch draws on this theme
at the end of DAS PRINZIP HOFFNUNG, defining hope as „something that appears to everyone in childhood, and where nobody has ever
been.“
Reto Camenisch did not use this idea as the title of his third book, maybe because it tends to disturb rather than provoke thought.
Still, we are meant to share his thoughts when we now read the title ZEIT [time], not least because the rest of the title has something
programmed about it (ORTE - places - was itself a temporary name for the landscape project).
The heimat which appears in individual pictures of different places finds its fulfilment in time, no matter how fleeting
and transitory. Reto Camenisch does not make it easy to discover the common factor in his landscape photographs,
to infer the decisive ingredients of his idea of home. The variety of his motifs is not just geographical but geological.
Dramatic views of mountains and cliffs in Switzerland and New Zealand rub shoulders with gently rolling hills and
coastlines. Some of his panoramas reveal no mark of human activity. Other shots clearly seek to convey the vanity of
taming effort. One such is the square of wooden fencing around a single tree in a snowstorm; another portrays tumbledown walls in the Andalucian highlands. The only factor common to all seems to be the intention to snatch an
unmistakeable composition of lines and light from the dark backward and abysm of time. These elements combine to
find an echo in the photographer‘s inner being. Possibly none of his pictures succeeds in this with greater fascination
than his shot of the Niesen, in the Bernese Oberland. The mountain is captured through a V-shaped section of valley
decked with pine trees. The mountain emerges from behind the zig-zagged black edge of the woodland, accentuated by a bright mist of cloud, to form a rhombus of near-equal sides. Compared with this dramatic scene, „Julier,
Graubünden“ is fairly unspectacular. In the middle distance, left, five cows graze on mountain pasture amid scattered
boulders. Still, there is the background of towering mountainside, almost saturated with dissolving shades of grey,
on which the shadows of the clouds themselves look like a rockscape. „Thus the mountain is seen from a distance
and from below. Its sole feature is steepness. Its victory is unquestionable, a walkover. The top of the mountain‘s
flank, this grey, smooth rock with a slight sheen, is like a plate, an armoured car, an inlaid work in fine steel or silver.
And the whole, long drawn-out profile of this peak structure under bright skies might also have lent the impression
of a giant ship sailing not only earthly seas, but into eternity.“ These words end the first section of Ludwig Hohl‘s
BERGFAHRT, a tale which took him over thirty years to write. We are bound to assume that, for Reto Camenisch too,
photography has struck an inner chord.
Kerstin Stremmel | Historican | Cologne | Germany
Mountains Pilgrims Places (2009 - 2010)
The Truth of a Landscape
For twenty five years Reto Camenisch had been toying with the idea of travelling to Nepal and Tibet. Between March and November
2009 he finally turned his plan into reality. In the previous year, when his mother had died, he suddenly knew that he would now start his
voyage. During his expedition he lived simply, slept in cheap hotels or in tents, climbed great heights in long stages – always equipped
with tripod and large-format camera. Of the nine months in total, he spent three on foot. This led to pictures which are far more than
just the documentation of an exotic journey. For us, the ones who look at them, they represent a calling, reminding us of our own desires
to commence journeys of a very special kind, also into the world of our dreams. There we face fears and the longing for clarification.
When looking at Camenisch’s pictures we enter a mental sphere which we otherwise keep locked away from ourselves. Reto Camenisch
opens that sphere for himself, but since he is an artist, he also does so for others. Some years before he had discovered gradualness. This
discovery changed his work. He had been an experienced photo journalist and portraitist; now he says that a picture must find him. He
dispenses with snapshots and fast staging. Neither does he pursue current conceptions, such as the collective pictorial imagination of
magnificence, which is widely available for Asian mountain landscapes. He does not expect anything – he waits. Then the picture comes to
him. Of course, for Camenisch’s dangerous trip no one rolled out the “Tibetan carpet” as Else Lasker-Schüler once had conjured. His Tibet
was tough reality.
It required strengths from him, of which he could not know whether he possessed them. He exposed himself, brain, neck and crop. There
was little water, he could rarely wash himself; the heights of over 5000 meters above sea level were challenging his body. More than once
he fell ill. He would not have made it on his own. Fabienne, his life partner, also travelled with him. This photographer went on a pilgrimage, without knowing exactly what God to seek, without wanting to know. He sought the supremacy of explicit reality, the truth. He has
been surrendering to the mountains for quite some time. Now, in Nepal, Tibet and Ladakh, this happened in an intensified manner. Only
the mountains should be the centre of attention. Therefore he did not document the efforts he endured crossing the Himalayan region.
Hardly any of his pictures thus show routes. For Camenisch mountains are manifestations of the absolute. He incorporated the efforts they
demand into the reformed picture, cleared of all coincidence. He interprets mountains in a way which also demands a lot from the viewer;
the energy of humility and a strange, if not frightened, admiration. Probation in light of a beauty, which does not bother about human
existence.
With his sacred sense for nature Camenisch reminds us of authors such as Charles Ferdinand Ramuz or Maurice Chappaz who called his
Valais a high valley of India. In the hymnal poetry “Haute route” Chappaz, however, does not omit that his eyes hurt, burn, bleed in the
horizontal snow storm. He mentions that he shoulders the backpack and the skis. He describes how he is driven to the upper mountainsides, over the passes. Camenisch’s pictures, on the other hand, are set apart from the concrete behaviour in the mountains. The artist
radically dispenses with all narrative elements. He can no longer relate to reporting, formerly his proper form of art. He eliminates human
movement at the mountain which was described in such detail by Chappaz. Camenisch’s mountains rise up to the eternal. They are perpendicular instances, terrible, dark, occasionally illuminated by a hidden sun. Dramatic changes are to be suspected only where crumbling
crashes and narrow ditches refer to erosion, as depicted in the picture “Rong Valley”, where large boulders stop in front of the abyss as
harbingers of a stone flood. This provokes associations of photos from Camenisch’s volume “Zeit” (2005): e. g. “Vorderer Lohner” and
“Lohner” in the Bernese Oberland. In this book the section of the black-and-white mountains is nicely supplemented by a sector dedicated
to humans and human traces. They appear in the subtly coloured pictorial sequences “Pilgrims” and “Places”. However, also here little
movement can be observed, instead we see peace and devotion in the depicted faces. The small sanctuaries, which Camenisch calls
“places”, are displayed in tender blue and grey tones. No great temples are photographed, instead he chose rather quiet indications of the
toilsome ways of purification. They seem poor, provisional; almost as if humans were not able to cope with the forces of creation. The photographer and mountaineer from Thun probably also saw himself as a pilgrim in Nepal and Tibet; definitely as someone, who completely
withdraws in view of the size of the landscape, both as a person and as an artist. It is never exactly clear from which location he looks at
his motives. The personal perspective has completely entered into the composition of horizon lines and surfaces. Shaded in different dark
tones, pictures of bold beauty emerged. These pictures, however, do not present themselves as works of art, Camenisch vehemently objects
to such interpretations. He understands the aesthetic work as service to the truth.
The photo by which he opens the volume “Bluesland” (1997) might be at the beginning of all of his mountain portraits: “Weissenberg,
Glarus”. At age six, in September 1964, his father suffered a fatal hunting accident on that mountain. During a discussion in November
2010 he stated that now, as a fifty-two year old father of adult daughters, he had probably overcome his childhood trauma, the early loss
of his own father. However, being aware of that event, it is hard not to see something like a dead man‘s zone in his pictures. One feels reminded of Meinrad Inglin’s narration “Die Furggel” (1943). At age fifty the writer therein processed the mountain death of his own father.
Inglin was thirteen years old when his father fell to his death in August 1906 due to tumbling rocks at the Tödi. In “Die Furggel” he turns
him into a hunter who, at an unexpected sighting of chamois, reaches for his binoculars, slips on the steep ground and silently falls to his
death with “grass in his fists”. The unsuspecting young son, who – in contrast to Inglin’s biography – had accompanied the man and been
told to wait at the Furggelgrat meanwhile sucks in “the enormous world”, high-spirited like a young prince, who just has taken over the
paternal realm. Only when morning breaks on the following day the desperately waiting boy learns that he has really taken it over. It took
decades, before Inglin was able to write about this tragedy. He did it in “Die Furggel” and again in the novel “Werner Amberg”. It also
took Reto Camenisch years before he dared to portrait the large mountain landscapes which since the volume “Zeit” (2005) have become
his preferential topic. In a discussion he stated that he had recognized that the danger posed by mountains was not his fate. He could thus
become a mountaineer, a climber. With exhaustion comes peace, and he breathes in the mountain. That is a spiritual experience; landscape
becomes a resonance body for the person who experiences it.
He experienced and explored his new area in three stages. The first and second route led to Nepal, first to the Khumbu region around
Mt. Everest, then from Simikot via Tuling and the Nara La pass to Hilsa and to the Tibetan/Chinese border. Important stations there were:
Taklakot, Lake Manasarowar, Darchen and Mt. Dock Kailash, the holy mountain of the Hindus. Route three led to North India/Ladakh.
From Leh, Ladakhs small high-altitude capital, via the Khardung La pass, which rises up to 5600 meters, he reached the Nubra and Indus
valleys. From there he again went back to Leh and then to the Rong valley and Lake Tsomoriri. However, the names of the places provide
only a pattern. They are not important for the pictures. The things which disturbed and politically infuriated this travelling photographer,
especially in the brutally controlled Tibet, remained unconsidered. Motives of coincidence and the contemporary did not make their way
into the pictures. Crucial elements were the isolation of steep rock cliffs, forlornness, the hidden promise. For days Camenisch connected
with his environment; he did not press the shutter before the light was in tune; when he – as he puts it himself – felt in sync with the
environment. During the more than ten years he has been experimenting with this kind of photography he developed something like a
permeable membrane with the landscape – provided it is vast enough. Internal and external views correspond with each other. In line with
his understanding of photography, he is on a constant quest for a mystic moment, an instant in which categories such as space and time
and all intentional will dissolve.
Each picture stands for itself. The unmistakable individual moment takes a stand against reproducibility which continues to determine
the profession. It is therefore not propitious to talk about series when describing this kind of photography. However, variations of topics
are noticeable. Variations of the vertical dimension at first, such as have captivated us already in the book “Zeit”, e. g. with “Muriwai II,
New Zealand”. There, only a bird seemed to be able to cope with the over–hanging walls. Somewhat mockingly the bird peeks beyond
the edge, watching the abyss underneath. The Asian pictures lack animals and, to a large extent, also plants. At times there is a gnarled
branch, lichens cover a rock, rarely a few trees. Many pictures were taken above the tree line. Photos like “Nubra Tal”, “Hilsa Valley” or
“Taboche” with the pointed mountain, which resembles a tumbling Matterhorn, consistently continue the vertical theme. “Limi Tal” is the
name of one of the rare photographs where routes are depicted, a little road which leads staggeringly down a hill. To travel such routes
by car with a local chauffeur – says Camenisch – is far more dangerous than to explore them by foot. The life of an individual is not worth
that much there.
The old horrors are again attributed to the landscape, but if one patiently observes, the rock face comes alive. The sunny edges here and
there, the steep black furrows, the slopes in pictorial grey tones let emerge pictures of an aesthetic force which could never be arranged,
which – beyond the mastering of the craft – can probably only be generated by waiting for the right moment. This photographer creates
something similar with the lakes and Tibetan tablelands. They appear vast, eliminated, lost in reverie. They oppose a magic horizontal
dimension to the vertical one.
The amazing photographs of Mt. Kailash present a new, hopeful moment. The mountain of the pilgrims is never depicted in front view.
Camenisch lets it peek through behind narrow valleys, between mighty crushed stone, gleaming snow-white, bright like a promise. These
pictures mark the crossover between a story of disaster and salvation. In this form Mt. Kailash resembles the Niesen pyramid in the
Bernese Oberland which we know from earlier works of the photographer. Years ago, at the Niesen, he discovered the world of mountains.
In view of the photographs of Mt. Kailash this now appears like its prefiguration. Camenisch walked around the holy mountain himself, but
he was no Hindu and no Buddhist, he stresses. He was beholden to basic Christian values. But still: in those Asian regions one learns that
the world is larger than we are led to believe. He claims that it was not so much Tibet – it has been destroyed over the last fifty years –
which conveys such a conviction, but rather Ladakh, where the Tibetan culture has, at least to some extent, still been preserved.
Dr. Beatrice von Matt, Zurich
Taboche | Nepal
Nubra Valley | India
Khumbu Valley | Nepal
Sambandan | Tibet
Baba Chandrboos | India
Tashi Nurboo | India
Bikaner | India
Lobuche | Nepal
Manasarowar | Tibet
Bluesland (1992 - 1995)
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Auf der letzten Seite seines Bildbands bedankt sich der Fotograf Reto Camenisch bei seinem Verlag, bei einigen Sponsoren, bei allerhand
Freunden - und bei Walter Liniger, dem er wohl eher zufällig in Columbia, South Carolina, begegnet ist. Gleich bei seinem ersten Besuch in
Amerika habe er Camenisch alle Illusionen und Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt genommen mit der Frage: „Why do bad things happen
to good people?“ Gleichsam wie ein nachgetragenes Programm steht sie nun über der gesamten Arbeit.
„Bluesland“ nennt der Schweizer Fotojournalist und -künstler sein Buch. Etliche Male hat er dafür seit 1992 die Städte und Landschaften
des Mississippi besucht. Um das glanzvolle Abbild der Region war es ihm allenfalls am Anfang zu tun, als er noch nach bildgewordenen
Klischees einer süß-bitter-traurigen Musik, aber auch der tragisch-heiteren Abenteuer der beiden Romanhelden Tom Sawyer und Huck Finn
suchte. Sehr schnell jedoch begriff er, wie dem Vorwort zu entnehmen ist, daß er „keine Schönheit, kein Idyll“ finden würde. Das Land war
karg und eintönig, die Menschen im besten Fall zurückhaltend und mißtrauisch. Die Spurensuche der Reise warf ihn deshalb immer nur auf
ihn selbst zurück. Vielleicht blieb er deshalb nie länger als ein paar Tage, wollte jeweils früher weg als ursprünglich geplant, und kam doch
schon bald wieder zurück. ,Weshalb widerfahren guten Menschen schreckliche Dinge?“ Diese Frage hatte ihn schon lange vor der Fahrt
beschäftigt, seit mehr als dreißig Jahren, als sein Vater bei einem Jagdunfall in den Schweizer Bergen ums Leben kam. Reto Camenisch war
damals noch ein Kind.
„Bluesland“ ist nicht in erster Linie die Suche nach dem Wesen eines Landes. Es ist die Suche nach einem Ort, der mit Heimat nur sehr
vage beschrieben ist, ein Ort, von dem man hofft, daß sich dort Sehnsüchte erfüllten. Folgerichtig beginnt das Buch mit Aufnahmen aus
der Schweiz, der unmittelbaren Umgebung des Fotografen: mit Interieurs in den Häusern von Verwandten, mit der kopfsteingepflasterten
Gasse eines kleinen Ortes, dem Pfad über eine Alm - und dem Pfeil auf der Startbahn eines Militärflughafens, der in die Ferne zeigt. Wo
gehört man hin, fragt Camenisch mit jeder seiner Fotografien. Wie richtet man sich ein? Und: Weshalb bleibt man, allen Widrigkeiten zum
Trotz?
Blues, wie ihn Reto Camenisch versteht, ist Trübsinn, Schwermut, Wehmut, vorgetragen im langsamen Tempo, die Tongebung ist instabil,
„dirty“ heißt der Fachterminus. In düsteren, kontrastschwachen Schwarzweißbildern fand er die optische Entsprechung. Dem Textmuster
des Blues, dem „Call and Response“, dem Wechselspiel von Anrufung und Antwort, das ein und denselben Sachverhalt zunächst eine
zeitlang variiert, bevor die Pointe folgt, fügt sich im Buch die Reihung der Bilder von immergleichen, heruntergekommenen Bars, von
verwaisten Stadtvierteln, öden Landstrichen - und Porträts der Bewohner jener geisterhaften Welt.
Der Regen hat die Glücksversprechen der Werbung von den Fassaden gewaschen. Der weiße Lack pellt sich von den Holzwänden einer
Kirche. „Our Place“ steht in schwungvoller Typographie über dem Eingang eines Ladens, vielleicht auch einer Bar - oder war es ein Schönheitssalon? Die Fenster sind mit Brettern vernagelt, das obere Geschoß ist rußverschmiert von einem Brand, der Dachstuhl eingestürzt.
Dazwischen Fotos von Menschen: Musiker auf der Straße, ohne Zuhörer. Ein Waffenhändler hinter dem Ladentisch, ohne Kunden. Ein
Leichenbestatter vor seinem Geschäft. Noch einmal: Wo gehört man hin?
Tröstet der Blues? Oder ist er ein Wehklagen? Sind diese Bilder eine Klage? Oder spenden sie Trost durch die Erkenntnis, daß wenigstens
die perfekte Komposition so etwas wie ein stimmiges Gefüge schafft, daß ihr es gelingt, selbst in einer Welt, die auseinanderfällt, eine
Struktur zu offenbaren, die flüstert, alles habe seine Ordnung? „Bluesland“ ist ein bewegendes Buch. Es läßt sich kaum betrachten, ohne
an Walker Evans zu denken, der während der Depression-Zeit der dreißiger Jahre in den ländlichen Gebieten des amerikanischen Südens
nach einem Gefühl von Stolz suchte, stark genug, um den schrecklichen Auswirkungen der Dürrekatastrophen und der Wirtschaftskrise
zu trotzen. Reto Camenisch steht auch in der Tradition eines anderen Schweizer Fotojournalisten und -künstlers, Robert Frank, der in den
fünfziger Jahren Amerika geradezu aggressiv als eine Welt der Einsamkeit, der Verlorenheit, auch Verlogenheit interpretierte - er freilich mit
einer radikalen Schnappschußästhetik. Camenisch aber war weder heroisch noch zornig zugange. Seine Arbeit ist geprägt von Melancholie, von tiefer Traurigkeit. Wie Tränen wirken bei ihm die vielen Pfützen auf dem regennassen Asphalt.
Freddy Langer | Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung | Frankfurt | Germany
Nashville | Tennessee
Dockery | Mississippi
Nashville | Tennessee
Interstate 20 West | Louisiana
Fox | Mississippi
Baton Rouge | Louisiana
James Son Thomas † | Leland MS
PORTRAITS (1992 - 2012)
The Visual Measurement of Melancholy
As a cultural and artistic act, the portrait delivers something of an eternal value into the present. This applies equally to painting and to
photography. The oscillation between self-generation and objectification never leaves viewers unmoved: when faced with portraits, we
can imagine ourselves in both positions—as the portraying and the portrayed. A successful portrait always remains somehow mysterious,
because it flickers between extreme familiarity and utter strangeness. Because of its inherent technology, photography is able to show this
vacillation most efficiently. Photography is a melancholy discipline. Its power as a medium lies in the approximate in-between. It is always
more than what it represents and grasps, and so it is always something in addition to what is depicted. Thus it is both what it represents
and what it is in-itself. In successful photographs, this hidden dynamic is visible, even if its object has been permanently stilled.
In the June issue of the magazine Merkur, scholar Valentin Groebner wrote that photography retroactively influences the way we talk
about human representation, reaching back even to the Renaissance. “What today’s viewers see in portraits five centuries old,” is mainly
due to the technical invention of photography. He says that this explains the overwhelming success of two recent exhibitions featuring
great portrait painters of the 15th and 16th century—including works by Dürer, Cranach, and Holbein. Groebner believes that Renaissance
portraits were influential upon contemporaries not “because they accurately represented the characteristics of an individual person, but
rather because they were able to generate the fictions of representability and similarity with such astounding virtuosity for their viewers.”
Whether photography has changed our perception of painted faces as far back as the Renaissance remains speculative. Without doubt,
however, no other artistic genre mirrors the myriad new possibilities of technical reproduction as profoundly as the portrait. There are
entire conceptual worlds between the stiffly arranged photographic portraits from photography’s early days, when long exposure times
registered the smallest movement, and, for example, the first portraits made via self-exposure. A Polaroid picture that enabled an instant
result in the 1970s speaks a completely different iconographic language then a self-portrait made with a digital camera. The iPhone seems
to serve young people as a kind of mirror that reassures them that they are still the same person that left the house that morning: a GPS
of permanent narcissism. The fiction of representability and similarity remain, however much the means of technological production have
changed.
The mass-transition from analog to digital photography sparked cultural and generational conflict. The art critic Hans Belting spoke of a
new era: „The photo print, on which the camera image was fixed forever will soon be a relic of the past. Digitally produced photos can be
instantly sent around the world, and they can be edited at any time. The moment we push the button no longer counts.“ A recent article
about digital photography in Der Spiegel was titled “Images without a Story.” Today, the news magazine rarely publishes any photographs
produced the old-fashioned way. This is how quickly the technical spiral turns. Analog photography is economically and technically a lost
cause. A press photographer who develops his own negatives in his darkroom is unable to stay in business. Formally perfect digital images
satisfy the demand for information faster. That seems to be enough.
Here, at last, we have arrived at Reto Camenisch’s portrait photography. Each of the black-and-white portraits in this book has an intrinsically unique materiality. The inherent information could also have been conveyed digitally, but, I dare say, the specific physicality and materiality can only be communicated via analog means. Physicality means a tangible substance, a material expansion that refers to a life-world
whose significance can only be generated exclusively in this present document of this unique event in this photographic encounter. The
subsequent chemical processing of the image takes place as a repetition of this act. This may sound like nostalgic exaggeration, like longdead artistic essentialism, but behind the technical construct looms the aesthetic concept of the uniqueness of human individuality and its
autonomous representability. Michel Foucault would have called it “the sovereign of the visible.” But why would visibility succeed better
with analog than with digital?
The aforementioned material extension goes far beyond a mere physical corporeality. It creates a spatio-temporal extension in which two
intentionalities—that of the portrayed and the portraying—ultimately meet in this moment, creating the evidence of mutual recognition
that seems to wrest the successful photo from any interpretative post-production processes. What happens here technically is similar to
the act of perception in phenomenology. The philosopher Vilém Flusser saw in this gesture of photography “an example of how technology
produces theory.”
Reto Camenisch would be the last person to get involved in an ideological debate over purity. As the head of the photography department
at the Swiss School of Journalism (MAZ), in Lucerne, he is aware of the limitless and fantastic possibilities of digital technology. However,
he also knows what each writer or artist is aware of: that every object culturally and aesthetically deserves its own genuine presentation. For the faces and people selected here, he has chosen an analog approach, perhaps because this “fiction of the representability
and similarity” (Valentin Groebner) creates for both sides a short moment of equal commitment. The space of compositional variation in
these photographs is very restricted. Camenisch creates the image’s ultimate expression not just through the person portrayed, but also
via elements of contextualization, which sometime receive more room than the person himself. And always that precisely arranged light,
sometimes bordering on the dramatic. Like a filter of objectivity, the gray shades linger over the black-and-white image. And the visual
measurement of melancholy respectfully remains, as if external and internal images would be identical just for a fraction of a second. Only
the darkroom will tell if this moment occurred at all.
Marco Meier | lic.phil / Lucerne / Switzerland
PORTRAITS (1992 - 2012)
Waiting for Sam
A giant forty-year old man with a reddish beard and tanned skin stretched across his prominent cheekbones enters the living room. With
velvety steps he slides over the fluffy royal-blue carpet. Sally, the housekeeper, has dressed her master finely: leather boots, silver necklace,
red handkerchief in the jacket pocket, an amulet with miniature harmonica—everything in its place. The man, who offers his big paw in
greeting, has the unreality of a wax figure. The furniture has not changed since 1957; the air conditioner gives off a smelly odor; and—as
if the afternoon sky outside the big window wanted to intensify this feeling of other-worldliness—the clouds frazzle in a surreal orange-purple, as if on a movie set. This is not today; here time stood still. In truth, the young man is old; the hair is dyed, the skin tightened.
“Look at me: A 76-year-old rock ‚n‘ roller,” he thunders, and then bares his dentures.
Do you remember, Reto? When we visited Sam Phillips, the inventor of rock ‚n‘ roll, the man who shook America with his vision of a
new music in the mid-1950s, and who changed the world? The grand music producer who discovered Elvis: Sam Phillips. In a one-story
suburban house in Memphis, Tennessee, he welcomed us. We had been begging for weeks for this meeting, had sent faxes, called dozens
of times in vain, trotted to Phillips’s son three times. The decision was always the same: Mr. Phillips does not give interviews. I would have
given up, but you persisted. And then, after days of anxious wait, suddenly the call: We were to be there in half an hour, at the South
Mendenhall Road, No. 79. Sam Phillips is expecting us.
“You want to take this Camenisch on your assignment?” asked the editorial staff of the nimble news magazine for which I worked. “But
he’s so slow.” Thank God, was this Camenisch slow! He had the stamina, the patience to wait for the right moment. And then he was
swift.
Your attitude, Reto, may be “slow,” your search, your tracking. And then, with a look, just one, single look, you get people to tell their
story. Do you remember? Evelyn Turner, Ike Turner‘s lively cousin, who managed the Crossroads, in Clarksdale? A bedraggled dance hall
with a sign on the wall reading, “Where there is dancing, there is hope!” Do you remember? Etta Baker, as she—then 87 years old—dug
out her Gibson Electric from the year 1958 the same way other great grandmothers get out their knitting stuff—and with what ease
she started playing that electric guitar? I know that you were there, but I can’t remember if you took photos. You never pushed anyone,
never overwhelmed anyone. You approached people with a concentrated presence, but unobtrusively; with curiosity, but also with respect.
Because you like people. This is what I have to think about when I look at your portrait of Sam Phillips.
Do you remember? The picture took three weeks, but in reality you only had two minutes for it. We sat for hours in Phillips‘ living room;
hours in which he told of his greatest success, that at the same time was also his biggest defeat: how in 1954 he made the first groundbreaking recordings with Elvis Presley, and how after only five singles and seventeen months, he lost him, cornered by a perfidious
manager from the big company RCA. For the ridiculous compensation of $35,000 Phillips had to let go of the singer, who would rise to be
the greatest of all times, selling a billion records.
Remember how he told the story in such exorbitant detail? How his gaze turned inward as he lost himself—maybe sensing that this
would be the last major interview before his death. He hushed. Screamed. Stopped. Whispered uncontrollably. And then burst out suddenly, wide awake, “I wanted to take on the novelty, the unexplored, the unproven; no one else had tried this before.” It was a tremendously
pioneering achievement to convince a white singer to sing “black” music in harshly segregated America. What made him sick was the
subsequent accusation that he had “stolen” music from the blacks. Because he had freed them. “I wanted to create an acceptance for the
black music that I so admired, and I needed a white man to break the barrier: Elvis.”
You listened and asked a question from time to time but never pulled the camera trigger. You waited until Phillips—night had already arrived—whispered to you: „Wanna take a picture, eh?“ He stood outside in the shadows next to the empty swimming pool and said: „Elvis
commissioned the same one over in Graceland after he had seen mine.“ And exuded both the pride of someone who is aware of his life‘s
work, but also the vulnerability of a man who feels betrayed by it. And then you photographed the monumental man. In your portrait he is
both the hungry rebel and the vulnerable old man, the living monument, the dying icon. Even then, Reto, you made a few pictures, but the
right ones. Much later I realized that the weeks and days before, the hours of waiting, were part of this picture. You gave Sam Phillips time.
Time to be himself. It is a big phrase, and I don’t know of any other photographers about whom I would say this but, I do believe: You see
into the souls of men.
The man who led us to the door was not the bright lad who had welcomed us hours earlier. Phillips, tired from talking, stirred by memory,
was now a frail, broken old man. But I need not tell the story; it‘s all included in the one image, Reto—you captured it all. Without you, I
would have never met Sam Phillips. From you I learned to be persistent yet calm at the same time. And I admire it, your calm persistence.
Bänz Friedli | Journalist and Comedian | Zurich / Switzerland
Reto Camenisch
Born in 1958, lives in Bern and is one of the most prestigious and consistent photographers in Switzerland. For years he was a highly soughtafter magazine
and advertising photographer. His portraits and reportages were published in, among others NZZ Zeitbilder, Du, Das Magazin, FAZ Magazin und Geo. In
2003 he terminated his co-operation with almost all print media and turned back on pure photojournalism. Camenisch exhibits regularly at Gallery Stephan
Witschi in Zurich and Gallery Bernhard Bischoff in Berne. Since 2011 he has been the head of the Photograpy Departement at The Swiss School for
Journalists MAZ in Lucerne.
Single Shows
2015 Galerie Stephan Witschi, Zürich
2015 Galerie Bernhard Bischoff und Partner, Bern
2015 Galerie für Alpine Fotografie Bsinti, Braunwald
2015 Etagen Bern, Kunstförderprojekt DC Bank und Loeb
2014 Fotokammer Luzern, Luzern
2013 Kornhausforum Bern, Porträts 1992 - 2012
2012 Galerie Stephan Witschi, Zürich
2011 Kudlek van der Grinten Galerie, Köln
2011 Galerie Stephan Witschi, Zürich
2010 Galerie Bernhard Bischoff und Partner, Bern
2008 Reto Camenisch, Filiale, Berlin
2007 Galerie Kudlek van der Grinten, Köln
2006 Galerie Römerapotheke, Zürich
2004 Shed 11 Wellington, New Zealand Centre of Photography
2003 Galerie Römerapotheke, Zürich, Einzelausstellung
Group Shows (Selection)
2015 Shanghai Art Fair, China
2013 Kunsthalle Palazzo Liestal | Schweizer Fotografie
2012 Art Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe / Urs Marty & Reto Camenisch
2012 Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, Bern / Reto Camenisch & Andy Harper
2011 Fotomuseum Winterthur, Von Horizonten
2010 Kunstmuseum Thun, Landschaft im Wandel
2010 Stadthaus Olten, Werke aus der Sammlung Max Amsler
2010 Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Sommerausstellung
2009 Robi Museum, Sils Maria, Schweiz
2008 Kudlek van der Grinten Galerie, Köln, Deutschland
2008 Paris Photo, Frankreich
2007 Photomonth Krakau, Polen
2006 Paris Photo, Frankreich
2006 Bieler Fototage, Biel Schweiz
2003 Kunsthaus Kannen, Münster, Deutschland, ‹Wer sieht was?›
2003 Galerie Bernhard Bischof, Thun, Schweiz
2002 Das Gelbe Haus, Flims Schweiz (Forever, Tattoo)
2002 Galerie Martin Krebs, Bern, Schweiz (Orte 4/5“)
2001 Suvretta House, St. Moritz, Schweiz
2001 STG & PWC, Basel. Schweiz (Orte 4/5“ / Driving)
1999 Driving Multimedia-Projekt Kanderdelta, Thun, Schweiz
1999 Herten/Köln, Deutschland, Internationale Fototage
1996 Peking, Schweizer Fotografie in Peking, China
1994 Berner Biennale, Biel, Schweiz
1993 Photoforum Pasquart, Biel, Schweiz
1993 Kunstmuseum Thun, Schweiz, Release Bürgerbilder
1991 Galerie Vis-â-Vis, Berlin, Deutschland
1990 Kunstmuseum Fribourg, Schweiz 150 Jahre Schweizer Fotografie
1990 Musée L’Elysée, Lausanne, Schweiz
1987 Kornschütte, Luzern, Schweiz
1985 Galerie Kornhaus, Bern, Schweiz, Grosser Fotopreis Kanton Bern
1984 Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Zürich, Schweiz, Junge CH-Fotografen
1983 Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Zürich, Schweiz (zur Robert Frank Ausstellung)
Monography
2012 «Reto Camenisch – Portraits »
2011 «Berge.Pilger.Orte», Edition Stephan Witschi Zürich (out of print)
2006 «Reto Camenisch – Zeit », Benteli Verlag, Bern (out of print)
1997 «Bluesland», Ott-Verlag, Thun (out of print)
1993 «Bürgerbilder» Benteli Verlag, Bern (out of print)
Book Contribution (Selection)
2010 50 Jahre Berner Rock
2008 Aus Liebe zur Heimat, herausgeber.ch
2006 Du, Nr. 771, Andrea Camilleri, Krimiautor
2006 Small Number-Big Impact, Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung
2005 Polo Hofer, Monografie, Edition Plus, Zürich
2002 Du, Nr. 728, Europas Bauern, Doppelheft
1990 Bernhard Hefti, Bildhauer, Benteli Verlag, Bern
1991 150 Jahre Schweizer Fotografie, Benteli Verlag, Bern
1991 Voir La Suisse autrement, Benteli Verlag, Bern
Cataloque
2012 Natur | Schweizer Fotografie, Palazzo Liestal, CH-Liestal
2010 Cahier Landschaft im Wandel, Kunstmuseum Thun, CH-Thun
2006 Die Rückkehr der Physiognomie, Fototage Biel, CH-Biel
2006 Powrot Fizjonaomii, Photomonth POL-Krakau
2005 Wer sieht was?, Kunsthaus Kannen D-Münster
2004 New Zealand Journal of Photography, NZ-Wellington
2004 Sammlung Kunstmuseum CH-Thun
2003 Reto Camenisch Galerie Römerapotheke CH-Zürich
1999 Internationale Fototage D-Herten
1998 Benefiz Auktion Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH-Winterthur
1997 Swiss Press Foto, CH-Zürich
1992 Berner Biennale, Kommission für Kunst & Architektur, CH-Bern
1988 Heimspiel, Kunstmuseum Thun, CH-Thun
1985 Hammer Olten / Mühle Thun, CH-Olten
1984 Promenade, Ausstellung im Schadaupark CH-Thun
1983 Sichtweisen, Kommission für Foto und Film Kt. Bern, CH-Bern
Awards (Selection)
2014 Kunst am Bau | Altersheim Kühelwil, Bern
2009 Stadt Bern, Abteilung für Kulturelles für Projekt „Höhere Welten“
2009 Stadt Thun Amt für Kultur für Projekt „Höhere Welten“
2005 Bundesamt für Kultur, Projektbeitrag
2005 Werkbeitrag für Monografie, Kanton Bern und Stadt Thun
2004 Pro Helvetia Projektunterstützung Ausstellung Wellington/NZ
2002 Werkbeitrag Stadt Thun für Orte 4/5»
1999 Kulturpreis der Stadt Thun
1996 Werkbeitrag Kanton Bern und Stadt Thun für Monographie «Bluesland»
1994 Nomination Kodak European Gold Award
1993 European Kodak Gold Award als Bester Schweizer Portraitfotograf
1992 Werkbeitrag Kt. Bern und Stadt Thun für Buchprojekt «Bürgerbilder»
1985 Fotopreis des Kanton Bern
1985 Stipendium des Kanton Bern, Parisaufenthalt
Media References (Selection)
2013 TV | Focus Reto Camenisch, Schweizer Radio DRS
2012 TV | Berg & Geist, Reto Camenisch, Film von Michael Lang und Beat Kuert
2011 Radio DRS 2, Sascha Renner, Berge Pilger Orte
2211 Radio DRS 4, Thomas Gutersohn, Berge Pilger Orte
2006 TV / SF DRS, Kulturplatz anlässlich Buchrelease und Ausstellung «Zeit»
1997 TV | SF DRS, Next Beitrag anlässlich Buchrelease Bluesland
1994 TV | 10vor10 Beitrag anlässlich Buchrelease Bürgerbilder
1985 Radio DRS 1, 3-teilige Reportage über den Fotografen Camenisch
anlässlich des Kodak Europeen Gold Award, Bester Schweizer Porträt Fotograf
Collection
DC Bank of Berne
Loeb Collection Berne
Schweizer Fotostiftung
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Graubündner Kantonalbank
Musée L’Elysée, Lausanne
Kunstmuseum Thun
Kantonale Kunstkommission Berne
Berner Kantonalbank, Berne
Price Waterhouse Coopers, Basel
Schweizerische Treuhandgesellschaft, Basel und Zürich
Kantonale Kommission für Kunst und Architektur Kt. Bern
Stiftung Wedekind, Zürich
Guggenheim Collection, New York
Landesbank Baden–Württemberg, Stuttgart
New Zealand Centre for Photography, Wellington