Our network of lecturers, guest lecturers and institutions
Director of the thematic area «History, Culture and Theology» at the University Library Zurich
Susanna Blaser-Meier directs the thematic area «History, Culture and Theology» at the University Library Zurich. She studied art history, medieval history, and classical archeology at the University of Zurich and library and information science at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her dissertation, entitled Hic iacet regina: Form und Funktion figürlicher Königinnengrabmäler, was published in 2018. Her research focuses on medieval art, gender studies, and art historiography. From 2010 to 2012, she taught at the University of Zurich; from 2009 to 2021 she served as director of the library of the Institute of Art History; and since 2020, she has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Kunst und Architektur in der Schweiz.
She is particularly interested in teaching interdisciplinary skills such as research techniques, information literacy, and writing support. In 2020, she took over the organization and leadership of a writing retreat for PhD students at the Institute of Art History. She is also a writing consultant for the Graduate Campus of the University of Zurich.
Art Historian, Photography Curator and Writer
Born in Switzerland, Julie Bonzon, Ph.D. is an art historian, photography curator, and writer. Following a Masters in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2015), she completed an AHRC-funded Ph.D. in the History of Art at University College London (2020), specialising in South African photography. A book based on her research, titled The Market Photo Workshop in South Africa and the 'Born Free' Generation: Remaking Histories was published by Routledge Photography in 2023.
Bonzon has led curatorial and education projects at Magnum Photos, The Photographer’s Gallery, The Ian Parry Scholarship, The Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, and The Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
She worked at the London gallery Messums as Director of Photography, setting up a new photography department representing international artists, and has since 2019 collaborated with private collectors alongside her curatorial activities.
In 2020, she founded The Photographic Collective, an online platform featuring lens-based artists living and working in Africa.
Curator, architect, and art historian, director of the Architekturgalerie München
Based in Munich, Nicola Borgmann works internationally as a curator, architect, and art historian. As director of the Architekturgalerie München, she has been organizing and designing exhibitions, projects, and events on current topics in architecture, landscape architecture, the city, photography, design, and art since 1992. Her core competencies are program conception, exhibition design, editorial work, communication, and moderation. Nicola Borgmann has conceptualized and realized exhibitions, symposia, and installations for clients including the Goethe Institute, the Architecture Biennale in Venice, the German Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), the city of Munich, the Technical University of Munich, the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, the State Textile and Industry Museum Augsburg, tim, the Association of German Architects, and the Bavarian Chamber of Architects. Since 2017, Nicola Borgmann has been implementing regenerative architectures in Ethiopia using the design-build method. Together with local residents and students from the architecture faculties of the University of Addis Ababa and Arba Minch University, these projects employ local, environmentally compatible materials to build schools and hospitals, both as new buildings and through conversion of existing structures. Nicola Borgmann complements her practical work with teaching, research, and publications. She has taught at the Technical University of Munich, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the Technical University of Nuremberg, and since 2019 at the University of Zurich, among other institutions. In 2011 Nicola Borgmann was awarded the Bavarian Architecture Prize, and in 2018 the Architecture Prize of the City of Munich. Nicola Borgmann has been a member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning (DASL) since 2008 and an honorary member of the Association of German Architects (BDA) since 2019. The Architekturgalerie München is a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, a partner of the New European Bauhaus (NEB), and a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) Germany.
Photographers
Jojakim Cortis (b. 1978, GER) and Adrian Sonderegger (b. 1980, CH) began their collaboration in 2006 at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland. Their photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, including at the MET in New York (US), Museum Folkwang in Essen (D), Fotostiftung Schweiz (CH), Lianzhou Foto Festival (CHN), and C/O Berlin (D). Their book Double Take was published in 2018 by Thames & Hudson (GB), Lars Müller Publisher (CH) and by Seigensha (JP).
Research Curator Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur
Michèle Dick is a research curator at the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur. She holds a degree in social anthropology with a specialization in visual anthropology. In 2022, she earned her doctorate from the University of Zurich and the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK). Her doctoral thesis focused on roll film photography by the Swiss ethnologist Florence Weiss, delving into the intersection of technology history, photographic history, and scientific practices. Her research examined how fieldwork photography in the late 20th century depicted but also shaped scientific understanding, both in fieldwork settings and within archival contexts. This work earned her the 2022 Annual Prize of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Zurich.
At the University of Zurich, Michèle Dick teaches courses on the history of visual anthropology and on photography in ethnographic museums. Her scholarly interests span scientific photography, the history of social anthropology and its collecting practices, photography within ethnographic archives, and documenting practices.
Curator, owner of gallery 19th & 20th Century Fine Art Photography, Zurich
Birgit Filzmaier studied art history, political science, and ethnology at the University of Freiburg with a master’s degree on “Francis Frith und die Reisephotographie im Orient des 19. Jahrhunderts.”
After gaining practical experience at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York and at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, she began her professional career—first as curator and later as director at the Galerie zur Stockeregg in Zurich, which specializes in American and European vintage photography. After joining SCALO Publishers, she was responsible for initiating the publisher’s gallery activities in Zurich. Here, her work focused on contemporary art and photography after 1960. Since 1998, Birgit Filzmaier has been working as an independent expert for photography in the international art market and in assisting private and institutional clients in building up their photographic collections.
Birgit Filzmaier has written a number of articles for exhibition catalogs, journals, and artists’ books, and has lectured on collecting photography at various locations including the Universidad Complutense, Madrid (Cursos de Verano, El Escorial).
Her activities as a cocurator have centered on presenting private collections to the public in museum settings, with projects including
2009 Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo, Allure: Collection Susanne von Meiss
2016 c/o Berlin, ALLURE: Collection Susanne von Meiss
2022 Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, A Personal View on High Fashion & Street Style: Photographs from the Nicola Erni Collection, 1930 to Now
Birgit Filzmaier is a member of the German Society for Photography (DGPh) and the Association of Art Historians in Switzerland (VKKS).
Preservation, reasearch and promotion of photographic works, Winterthur
Founded in 1971, Fotostiftung Schweiz is a private non-profit foundation, devoted to preserving, researching and conveying photographic works. It primarily collects photographic works related to Switzerland (Helvetica), from the beginnings of photography to the present day. In so doing, it incorporates artistic forms of expression, as well as documentary, applied and private forms of photography.
With four to six exhibitions each year, Fotostiftung Schweiz presents important positions in current and historical photography. In addition to the exhibitions on its own premises in Winterthur, it regularly shows works from its collection in Swiss and international museums.
Fotostiftung Schweiz is actively involved in the imparting of knowledge. By means of mediation formats for schools and private individuals, it enhances visual literacy and competence for a responsible and critical approach to photographic images. It releases monographic or themed publications, so as to make the photographers it represents known to a broader public. Moreover, for its own publications on photography’s history or for contributions to specialist journals, it conducts research into the history of Swiss and international photography. It operates an online database, in which it makes its digitised holdings accessible for research and available for use.
Together with Fotomuseum Winterthur, Fotostiftung Schweiz runs a specialised public library with over 30,000 publications on the subject of photography.
Senior Collection Manager, Nicola Erni Collection
Valentina Frutig has been the Senior Collection Manager of the Nicola Erni Collection since 2017, a major art collection focusing on photography and contemporary art. She holds a master’s degree in Art History and Theory & History of Photography from the University of Zurich. Before graduating she worked at Christie’s in Zurich as a business coordinator. Subsequently Valentina Frutig was involved in the VIP Team of Art Basel and was responsible for the Swiss collectors.
Photo: Kuenzli Photography
Art historian, associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Michaela Giebelhausen is an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2014 to 2020, she directed the undergraduate program in culture, criticism and curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. From 1994 to 2014, she held the position of lecturer and then senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century art, architecture, and photography, with special focus on English painting connected to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, in addition to museum architecture, history of museums, and history of photography, especially the photographic documentation of the Paris Commune. Her publications include the monograph Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (first published in 2006), as well the edited volumes The Architecture of the Museum (2003) and Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (together with Tim Barringer, first published in 2009). Other publications include a contribution on the Collard photographic studio in the collection edited by N. C. Nilsen, Nineteenth-Century Photographs and Architecture: Documenting History, Charting Progress, and Exploring the World (2013). In 2023, a volume she had coedited with Natasha Adamou, Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions, will be published by Routledge.
President of CAS in Theory and History of Photography and professor for the history of the fine arts, University of Zurich
Bettina Gockel holds the chair for History of the Fine Arts and is the director of the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Institute for Art History at the University of Zurich. She has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, USA, as well as a visiting professor at Gakushūin University, Tokyo, among other positions. Recent publications include the widely praised edited volume The Colors of Photography (2021), in addition to founding the digital publication series Art & Photography.
Gallery owner and art dealer, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich
For fifteen years, Christophe Guye was the owner and managing director of a communications agency in Zurich, which was taken over by an international agency network in 2004. Since 2006, he has been working as a gallery owner and art dealer for contemporary artistic photography. Also in 2006, he opened his first gallery, SCALO|GUYE, in Los Angeles as part of a programmatic collaboration with Walter Keller of SCALO Publishing and Gallery. He also served as director of the Galerie zur Stockeregg during its reorientation from classical to contemporary photography and has worked as curator for the Miroslav Tichy Ocean Foundation. Since 2010, he has been active with his current gallery, the Christophe Guye Gallery, located in Zurich, which represents numerous nationally and internationally recognized artists in situating the medium of photography in the broader context of contemporary art practice. In this period of time, he has also organized over one hundred exhibitions in galleries, cultural institutions, and art fairs in Switzerland and abroad. He also advises numerous private art collectors and institutional collections on developing and expanding their collections. In 2021, he held a position as part of the guest gallery program of the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography.
Curator of Photography and Head of Photo Archive, Museum Rietberg Zurich
Nanina Guyer has been Curator of Photography at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich since 2018. She studied Ethnology and Economic and Social History at the University of Zurich and completed her doctorate at the University of Basel with a thesis on historical photographs in Sierra Leone and Liberia. As part of the Swiss National Science Foundation project «Hans Himmelheber – African Art and Entangled Knowledge Production» (2019-2022) she conducted research on 1930s photography in the Congo.
Her curatorial interests include various aspects of the global history of photography and its site-specific characteristics (see the exhibitions Egyptian Dreamworld – Early Photographs by Pascal Sebah and Émile Béchard, 2018; «The Future is Blinking» – Early Studio Photography from West and Central Africa, 2022), critical approaches to ethnographic and colonial photography (CONGO AS FICTION – Art Worlds Between Past and Present, 2019; An Eye for Art – Photographs from West Africa and India by Eberhard Fischer from around 1970, 2021; Look Closer – African Art in the Himmelheber Archive, 2023) as well as contemporary artists who are concerned with colonial photography in their work (CAP Prize exhibition in Rieterpark 2022, a further exhibition will open in spring 2026).
Vienna-based photo historian and editor of the journal «Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie»
Anton Holzer is photo historian who has edited the journal Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie since 2001. He studied political science, philosophy, and history in Innsbruck, Bologna, and Vienna, completing a doctorate at the University of Vienna. He has led several research projects on the history of photography and published on various topics in the history of photography, media, and culture, including photojournalism, war photography, the media history of photography, photography and popular culture, ethnology and photography, and exile photography. As a curator, he has conceptualized numerous photo exhibitions and published catalogs. He regularly writes about photo and media topics in Austrian, Swiss, and German newspapers and magazines (such as NZZ and FAZ). He has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Vienna (Institute of Art History, Institute of Theater, Film and Media Studies), the University of Lucerne (Department of History), Danube University Krems (Department of Visual Studies), and the Linz University of Art (Media Culture and Art Theories).
Photo: Stefan Csáky
Substitute professor at LMU Munich with a focus on twentieth-century and contemporary art
Since 2023, Sophie Junge has been a substitute professor at the Institute of Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich with a focus on twentieth-century and contemporary art. Previously, she was a senior assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich. She studied art history, modern history, and Dutch studies at the University of Cologne. Her teaching and research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first century art and photography, with a focus on post-1970 American art, photographs from so-called colonial contexts, and contemporary art from Southeast Asia. She combines this wide range of research topics with a methodological interest in how images and objects come to be canonized and related questions about the accessibility of art and art history. In 2013, she received her PhD from the University of Zurich with a thesis on the reception of artworks about the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The dissertation was awarded the Deubner Prize and was published in German in 2015 and English in 2016. Her ongoing postdoctoral project is dedicated to the reception of colonial photography collections from Indonesia and Singapore in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the editor of the special issue «Fotografie und Kolonialismus» of the journal Fotogeschichte (2021) and the edited volume Survey Practices: Landscape Photography across the Globe (coauthored with Erin Hyde Nolan), which appeared with Routledge in 2022.
Postdoc assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich
Stella Jungmann is a postdoc assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich. She studied global cultures at the University of California, Irvine, and media culture and art theory at the Linz University of Art. Her dissertation project examined the meaning and function of early Japanese photographs in the United States in the nineteenth century. In 2018, her article “Developing Photographs and Networks: Images of the Japanese Mission in 1860” appeared in PhotoResearcher. Awards she has received include the Terra Foundation travel grant and the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund grant for her research trips to Japan and the United States. Together with Sophie Junge, she organized the 2018 international workshop «Travelling Images: Circulating Photographs, Objects, Knowledge.» Her research and teaching interests include the circulation and dissemination of photographs in print media, nineteenth-century American photography, and photohistoriography. She regularly teaches introductory modules and seminars at the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich.
Art historian, author, and professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg
Wolfgang Kemp is an art historian, author, and professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg. He studied art history, philosophy, and German language and literature, with a doctorate (1970) and Habilitation or second dissertation (1979) in art history. Until 1974, he was a research assistant at the University of Bonn, until 1983 professor at Kassel Comprehensive University (Gesamthochschule Kassel), and until 1995 professor at the University of Marburg. He was then appointed professor of art history at the University of Hamburg, where he remained until his retirement in 2011.
Since 1980, he has also held several visiting professorships, including at Harvard University, UCLA, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles. He has published numerous studies on the theory and history of photography, on reception aesthetics, and on narratological research, including Geschichte der Fotografie: From Daguerre to Gursky (3rd ed. 2019); John Ruskin: 1819–1900. Leben und Werk (2016); Der explizite Betrachter: Zur Rezeption zeitgenössischer Kunst (2015), Theorie der Fotografie (new ed. 2011).
In 2018, he was awarded the Cultural Award of the German Society for Photography.
Art historian, author, publisher, and extraordinary professor of modern and contemporary art history, University of Zurich
Wolfgang F. Kersten studied art history, philosophy, archeology, and empirical cultural studies at the universities of Tübingen and Marburg. He received his doctorate in 1985 in Marburg with a thesis on Paul Klee, and completed a Habilitation in 2002 at the UZH with studies on modernist painting. In 1985, he held a position at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, and from 1986 to 1891 at the Paul-Klee-Stiftung in the Kunstmuseum Bern. From 1988 to 1989, he held a postgraduate fellowship from the Getty Grant Program. Since 1988, he has taught at the Universities of Bern, Zurich, and Graz; in summer semester 2004 he held a visiting professorship at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern.
From 1 November 1991 to 31 August 2019, he was employed at the UZH Institute of Art History, while being involved in producing exhibitions in cities including Bern, Düsseldorf, Kyoto, Leipzig, Schopfheim, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Vienna, and Zurich. Beginning in 2005, his teaching and research increasingly focused on the field of theory and history of photography, and since 1 September 2019, he has been self-employed with projects including fundamental research in art and photography history (on Lily Klee and Paul Strand, among other topics).
Professor of art and new media, Humboldt University Berlin
Charlotte Klonk is professor of art and new media at Humboldt University Berlin and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She studied art history in Hamburg and Cambridge and received a PhD from Cambridge in 1992 with a thesis on English landscape painting and natural history images from around 1800. She then spent a year working as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, followed by a position as a research fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford. From 1995 to 2005, she held the position of lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick. She has been a fellow at institutions including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Her recent publications include Revolution im Rückwärtsgang: Der 6. Januar 2021 und die Bedeutung der Bilder (2022), Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (2017), and Image Operations, edited with Jens Eder (2016).
She currently directs on ongoing German Research Foundation (DFG) project: Nationales Kulturerbe: Das Kulturgutschutzgesetz im Spannungsfeld von Gemeinwohlinteressen und Privateigentum.
Photography Lab
The Laboratorium is a renowned photo laboratory specializing in the production of exhibition prints and artist editions as well as the creation of digital data for book publications.
With our extensive experience in various techniques of both analog and digital image production, we cover a broad spectrum ranging from traditional fine art printing processes to modern digital fine art inkjet prints, including special carbon pigment inks. Originally established as an analogue black and white laboratory, we expanded our services 17 years ago to offer digital services in the areas of digitization, digital image restoration, general image processing and digital printing processes.
Our long-standing collaboration with renowned photographers and institutions both locally and globally speaks to our expertise. Among our recent project partners are notable individuals and institutions such as Flor Garduño, Daniel Schwartz, Ester Vonplon, Hannes Schmid, Fotostiftung Schweiz, the Werner Bischof Estate, and the Bündner Kunstmuseum. A complete list of references is available at www.laboratorium.ch.
A key concern of our lab is the preservation and promotion of traditional darkroom techniques alongside modern digital methods. This includes the production of silver gelatin hand prints, as well as alternative fine art printing techniques such as platinum-palladium prints and cyanotypes.
Freelance art historian and cultural scholar based in Vienna
Ulrike Matzer is an art historian and cultural scholar focusing on the history and theory of photography, the history of science and media, gender studies, and visual culture. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher and most recently visiting professor for history and theory of photography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She received her PhD (with distinction) from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her dissertation Eine Gender-Analyse von Fotografie-Historiographien am Beispiel zweier Berufsfotografinnen in Wien (1860–1914) was recognized with the Johanna-Dohnal-Förderpreis in 2021 and given special mention as part of the Thinking Photography prize awarded in 2021 by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie.
Ulrike Matzer studied art history and literature in Salzburg and Paris, with a focus on the history of art and photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has taught at the Art University Linz (2003–05) and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2006–08); worked from 2009 to 2012 in the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) research project on Josef Maria Eder in the photo collection of the Albertina Vienna; and was a fellow from 2015 to 2017 at the Photoinstitut Bonartes inVienna. She has also long written as a critic for Fotogeschichte and Camera Austria, with additional publications including Marianne Strobl, “Industrie-Photograph” 1894–1914 (2017); Maren Gröning, ed., in cooperation with Ulrike Matzer, Frame and Focus: Photography as a Schooling Issue (2015); Josef Maria Eder. Photographie als Wissenschaft: Positionen um 1900, edited with commentary by Maren Gröning and Ulrike Matzer (2013).
Kunstmuseum für aussereuropäische Kulturen
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Laboratory for image production
Art collection with focus on photography and contemporary art, Steinhausen near Zug
The Nicola Erni Collection in Steinhausen near Zug houses an extensive art collection with a focus on photography and contemporary art. For over twenty-five years, collector Nicola Erni has followed her passion and acquired works that speak to her heart. This formed one of the largest photography collections in private hands, combining two main areas: photographs of the legendary art, music, film, and fashion scene of North America and Europe from the 1960s and 1970s and an extensive collection of fashion photographs from the 1930s to the present. Works by photographers such as Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Sarah Moon, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman or Andy Warhol are included in the collection.
Contemporary art is another significant branch of the collection with works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Elmgreen & Dragset, Duane Hanson, Sylvie Fleury or Rashid Johnson. One of Nicola Erni’s priorities is to constantly promote emerging artists and commission unique series of works to enhance their artistic careers.
Website Nicola Erni Collection
Foto: Reto Pedrini Photography
Director of the Centre de la Photographie Genève
Danaé Panchaud (*1983, CH) is an exhibition curator, museologist and lecturer specialising in photography, and the director of the Centre de la Photographie Genève, one of the main Swiss institutions dedicated to contemporary photography. She served from 2018 to 2021 as director and curator of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. She trained in photography at the Vevey School of Photography before completing a bachelor’s degree in visual arts with a specialisation in curatorial practices at HEAD – Geneva University of Art and Design. She later studied museology at Birkbeck, University of London, earning a master’s degree in 2017. She has held positions in several Swiss institutions in the fields of contemporary art, design and science, including the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, where she was a research associate from 2007 to 2012, the Gallery SAKS in Geneva in 2012-2013, and the mudac in Lausanne, where she was in charge of the public relations from 2012 to 2017. As a free-lance curator, she has curated exhibitions for several Swiss museums, independent spaces and galleries, and written critical texts for monographs of contemporary artists, exhibition catalogues, and thematic publications such as Flora Photographica, co-authored with William Ewing and published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. She was a lecturer at the Vevey School of Photography from 2014 to 2018.
Photo: Anne Morgenstern
Art historian, curator, and former director of the Heinrich Gebert Kulturstiftung Appenzell
Roland Scotti was born in 1957 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein and is a French citizen. After studying art history, East Asian art history, and Romance languages and literature, he began his career in 1986 as a research assistant for various institutions, including the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. During this time, he also worked part-time as a freelance exhibition organizer, television editor, writer, and director of the gallery 1-2-3 in Mannheim, devoted to contemporary photography. From February 1997 until the end of April 2006, he served as curator of the Kirchner Museum Davos, and from May 2006 to October 2022, he directed the Heinrich Gebert Kulturstiftung Appenzell (Kunstmuseum Appenzell//Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte). Since 1980, he has been responsible for realizing over 150 exhibitions, and has produced more than 120 publications on art education, avant-garde art, 1960s art, contemporary art, and the history of photography. His work has also been marked by a twenty-six-year long, intensive cooperation with the Göttingen publisher Gerhard Steidl, including the joint production of thirty books and several exhibitions.
Photo: 2021, Börries Hessler
Freelance art historian, author, curator, and former director of the Fotomuseum Winterthur
Urs Stahel studied German, history, and philosophy at the University of Zurich. After completing his studies, he worked as an editor for Der Alltag and for the art magazine du, as an art critic for Weltwoche and ART in Hamburg, and as a freelance publicist and curator. From 1986 to 1992, he taught at the Höhere Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. In 1986, he was cofounder of the Kunsthalle Zurich; in 1993, cofounder of the Fotomuseum Winterthur; from 1993 to 2013, director and curator of the Fotomuseum Winterthur; and in 2000, cofounder and curator of the event and exhibition space, bar, and café Coalmine in Winterthur.
Since 2013 he has been working independently as a curator, author, lecturer, and consultant. As a curator, he has worked mainly for the Fondazione MAST in Bologna, with tasks that include building up its collection of industrial and work photography. As a consultant, he has mainly worked for the Art Vontobel art collection in Zurich and the Foto Colectania in Barcelona. From 2014 to 2020, he also served as president of SpectrumPhotography in Switzerland. He has held positions as lecturer/visiting professor/visiting fellow at ZHdK (2013–2018), the University of Zurich (2014–2015), the University of Lucerne (2018), and the London College of Communication (2017–2019). In 2015 he was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim/Grand Prix Swiss Art, and in 2019 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences at the University of Lucerne.
He has curated many exhibitions and authored and edited numerous books, on artists including Paul Graham, Rineke Dijkstra, Joachim Brohm, Luigi Ghirri, Zoe Leonard, Roni Horn, Anders Petersen, Shirana Shahbazi, Astrid Klein, Ai Weiwei, Stefan Burger, Amar Kanwar, David Goldblatt, Hans Danuser, Claudio Moser, Boris Mikhailov, Sharon Ya’ari, Lewis Baltz, Thomas Ruff, Dayanita Singh, Jitka Hanzlova, Valérie Jouve, E.O. Hoppé, W. Eugene Smith, Thomas Struth, and Richard Mosse; and on topics such as «Hybrid,» «Uncanny,» «Trade,» «Im Rausch der Dinge» (Intoxicated by things), «Darkside I + II,» «7P – 7 Places, 7 Precarious Fields,» «The Power of Images,» «Pendulum – Moving Things, Moving People,» «Face Control,» and «Uniform» (about the role of work clothing in industry and society).
Professor of history of photography, Rutgers, The State University in New Jersey, USA
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography. His scholarship concentrates on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art, generally focusing upon moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany, for the Reaktion Books Exposures series (2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). He recently coedited and contributed to a special issue of the journal History of Photography under the rubric of “Is Photomontage Over?” (2021). His current book project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung -- The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice.