57 years of world history in 120 photos

Can you remember where you were when the wall fell? When John F. Kennedy was shot? And when the first man first stepped on the moon? What image comes to mind when you hear the word "Tiananmen square massacre"?

Our memories of events that held the world in suspense, are often images – photographs or television recordings – linked. And some of them have become icons. Jeff Wideners the picture of the man in front of four huge tanks in Tiananmen square, for example. Or René Burri's portrait of Che Guevara, the cards to mugs adorned with today's post pretty much everything. And unlike in the case of Burri, known far beyond the art scene, the names of many photographers who have made images that are today in all of our heads, is hardly known.

The photographer as narrator

In the years after the Second world war were the areas the heyday of photo journalism: magazines sekabet such as "Life," "Time Magazine", "Paris Match" or "star" printed page long reports from crisis and unknown countries. The photographer (in fact, were almost exclusively men) was the narrator, which allowed people to look through the key-hole, in strange and distant worlds.

of Course, this view, the borrowed eye of the photographer has to do much with myth. But it was in these pre-Internet years, one of the few opportunities to learn here in Switzerland, for example, from the war in Cambodia, or the world of life in Cuba.

Old exhibition

The Show, which is now on display in the photo Bastei is not new – on the contrary. Most of the 120 photographs taken between 1932 and 1989 and now in Zurich, have already been shown to thirty years ago. The exhibition was called at that time "In Our Time The World as seen by Magnum Photographers" and United, as the Name says-300 pictures of the today's most important photographers cooperative Magnum Photos.

This also included the two Swiss Werner Bischof and René Burri, whose photographs are now to be seen in the photo Bastei. The accompanying publication, which is still being transfered, is today a reference book for the history of Photography and historical events, it is not surprising therefore.

photo Bastion
Sihlquai 125
opening: Thu 28.11. from 18 clock
To 15.3.2020
Wed–Sat 12-21 h, sun 12-18 h
entry 12 / 8 Swiss francs
www.photobastei.ch

Created: 28.11.2019, 17:34 PM