The Incredible World of Photography. Ruth and Peter Herzog Collection

The little discovery that had such a big impact was an anonymous image that Ruth and Peter Herzog came across at a Zurich flea market in 1974. It shows a circle of women at their spinning wheels with a Spitz reclining at their feet. An elderly woman winds the yarn at the center. The scene reminded Peter Herzog of his own family history, but for both collectors it sparked the realization that photography had the potential to be both art and a historical document.

The purchase of the photo of the spinners awakened the Herzogs’ love of collecting. From the start, their criteria for selecting and arranging the photos were subjective. Thus over the years a collection was born whose structuring principle consisted of the apparently chaotic juxtaposition and interaction of diverse images. This deliberate disorder, echoing the idea of the world in a nutshell, connects the Fotosammlung with the early modern era’s cabinets of curiosities.

Because they conceived of their collection as touching on all areas of modern humanity, the Herzogs deliberately chose to avoid such usual organizational principles as chronology and photographers’ names. Instead, they organized the photographs by subject (travel, countries) and in categories (portraits / family albums, nature, industry) that they determined themselves.

From family scenes to images from the front, from sporting events to pornography – no motif photographed on a mass scale is absent from the collection. As Peter Herzog put it, its goal is to “depict in all its diversity human life in the industrial age.” This compass is what makes it so unique. Alongside individual images, the Herzogs also bought albums, boxes, the estates of other collectors, and entire photo archives.

The 19th-century photo album was above all a way of demonstrating the owner’s social position. In the 20th century, it became more a matter of expressing individuality. Nonetheless, many albums resemble each other in terms of what they show and how they show it.

Most images are dated and captioned. Postcards are frequently pasted in as well. It was quite common at the time to incorporate small souvenirs of this sort. Family albums were sometimes partially decorated with elaborate illustrations as well.

Photo albums are intimate objects, telling the story of one individual or a group. They are full of moments that at first glance appear utterly unique. At the same time, they convey something about entire generations. Comparing numerous family albums reveals standardizations in how the individuality of different people is presented. We see the degree to which particular experiences resemble each other and the structures and patterns that affect our own lives.

To people who did not experience the war, these private images can be intensely disconcerting. Grisliness is condensed here in the intimate format of a handy, neatly captioned album. What makes us feel uncomfortable was apparently considered a memorable enough moment to capture in a photo.

The Moon Landing was conceived from the beginning as a media event. The mass circulation of spectacular images was part of the mission of putting the first man on the moon. Some of the photographs, including this image of Aldrin, became icons and found their way into our collective pictorial memory.

Even people who are uninterested in art know the Mona Lisa and her mysterious smile. This photo shows a street hawker in Paris in August 1911. That day the only postcards he was selling were images of the Mona Lisa. For just a few days before, art thieves had stolen the famous painting from the Louvre in a spectacular heist. But the vender’s postcards were far more than mere reproductions! They were to have a decisive influence on the painting’s history.

The Mona Lisa didn’t become irreplaceable until it vanished. Newspaper photographs of the empty wall in the Louvre on which it had hung made palpable the absence of the original. While postcards sent by the thousands helped the painting achieve world fame, photography was simultaneously posing a question: was the original actually necessary? For the art world, this was a veritable earthquake!

If you own a postcard of the Mona Lisa is it even important for the original to hang in the Louvre? After the painting was recovered, the Louvre answered this question by isolating it in its own special space – emphasizing its singular importance.

Photography polarized. Defenders and opponents had bitter debates, asking what the medium could accomplish. Its usefulness as a form of documentation was quickly recognized. But opinions about its artistic value diverged. Many found the idea of a picture formed through technical means to be too mechanical and not creative enough.

There is no better symbol of the 19th century’s faith in progress than the Eiffel Tower. Erected for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, it was a celebration of all of the century’s technical accomplishments. And photography counted among these.

Illustrated newspapers created a constantly growing market for photographs and turned the picture into a mass medium par excellence. Karl Marx considered photography a symbol of progress alongside the railroad, steam power, telegraphy, and natural gas facilities.

Robert Delaunay depicted this emblematic structure a total of thirty times. This painting is abstract, and yet the characteristic construction remains recognizable. The painting style, inspired by Cubism, breaks the tower – and the city – down to its individual facets, showing various perspectives simultaneously. It is said that photography prepared the way for modern painting, since art no longer had the task of depicting reality.

Photography incorporated reproductions of paintings into its offerings quite early. Studios specialized in photographing works of art were established in the 19th century, giving armchair travelers an inexpensive and comfortable way to visit the museums of the world.

The debate over how an original work of art relates to its copy became more urgent once photography had established itself as a truly mass medium after World War II. This tension between original and copy sparked contemporary art in important ways. What is so important about authenticity and originality anyway?

Sherry Levine’s provocative oeuvre tears the idea of authorship from its moorings. As one of the key representatives of “Appropriation Art” she is known for taking over the works of male photographers and painters. With L’Absinthe, Levine brings us face to face with fundamental questions about the relationship between photography and painting; repetition, framing, and presentation within the museum grant the status of an artwork in its own right to the copy of a copy.

Photographers began quite early to experiment with color, either by means of special development processes (cyanotypes) or by coloring motifs by hand afterward. Each photographer used his or her own developer, which gave a special color to the prints.

With the autochrome process, realistic color rendering was already possible as early as 1903. Even then, color photography had a rather poor reputation, particularly among art photographers. Until the 1970s the black-and-white aesthetic prevailed as a way of emphasizing an image’s quality as art. Color for its part was associated with advertising and other products of mass culture.

The Fotosammlung Ruth und Peter Herzog preserves the estate of Hans Hinz (1913–2008), including many popular advertising motifs from the 1950s and 1960s. The strong coloring is typical of the times. While Hinz was a pioneer of international advertising photography, his work is little known today. This is due partly to color photography’s poor reputation at the time. Moreover, Hinz was hired as a contractor and was not supposed to deliver his work in any signature style.

Color was essential to Hinz’s photographic practice. His experiments made him an international leader in his field. After Kodak brought its new Ektachrome film to the market in 1948, he was the only photographer in Switzerland with the capacity to develop it in his own lab.

No other visual medium and no other art form are as ubiquitous today as photography – whether in art, in reportage, in advertising, or on our smartphones. Most of us produce thousands of photos on our cellphones alone, sharing them with the entire world over social media.

There is not just one kind of photography. There is private photography; there is public photography; there are documentary, press, and advertising photography. And art photography. Ruth and Peter Herzog wanted to do justice to this diversity. But it is not enough to collect pictures. One has to be able to read them, too.