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Christian Andersen | Ruth Blesi | Collectif_FACT | Marianne Engel | Klodin Erb / Eliane Rutishauser | Serge Frühauf | Goran Galic / Gian-Reto Gredig | Anna Kanai | Körner Union | Hendrikje Kühne / Beat Klein | Florence Lacroix | Loan Nguyen | Marco Poloni | Katja Richter | Rockmaster K | Daniel Schibli | Christian Schwager | Shirana Shahbazi | Nele Stecher | Christian Waldvogel | Herbert Weber.

Today, more than ever before, photography is a hybrid, a composite that mixes documentary and fiction, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, analog and digital, visual pleasure with iconoclasm. As such, it reflects the fragmentation of personal experience, the dislocation of our world view and the loss of our sense of self. Found photography, banal photography, manipulated photography, photo-romans, staged photography, morphed photography, resilient documentary photography - this visual medium still has - despite the fact that the art market is now turning away from it - a boundless ability to question, analyse and reflect the world around us. Needless to say, the availability of so many different photographic approaches grants enormous freedom, but with it there must also be a structural awareness of the medium itself and of its context in the media in general, for only in the friction generated between application and reflection can true visual greatness, density and complexity be achieved. Swiss photography has developed exponentially in the past two decades,as documented in a number of publications since 1990: Wichtige Bilder - Fotografie in der Schweiz, 1990 (Important Images - Photography in Switzerland), Nouveaux intinéraires, 1991 (New Directions), Voir la Suisse autrement , 1991 (Seeing Switzerland differently), Helvetia condensed, 1992, Blind - Junge Fotografie aus der Schweiz, 1992 (Blind - Young Photography from Switzerland), Photographie in der Schweiz von 1940 bis heute, 1992 (Photography in Switzerland from 1940 to the Present), Aus der Romandie, 1993 (From French Switzerland), Bilderzauber - ein seriöses Spiel, 1996 (The Magic of Images - A Serious Game), Die Klasse, 1996 (The Class),Weltenblicke - Reportagefotografie und ihre Medien, 1997 (World Views - Photojournalism and Its Media), Young - Neue Fotografie in der Schweizer Kunst, 1999 (Young - New Photography in Swiss Art) and Zeitgenössische Fotokunst aus der Schweiz, 2002 (Contemporary Photography from Switzerland). These publications show how, in Switzerland, as on the international scene, a wealth of visual ideas, visual strategies and approaches has made its mark and how the world of photography has grown in richness and intensity year by year. In the light of this, we decided to find out how young photographers and artists are actually working with the medium of photography today. We wanted to know how they were dealing with the growth of digitisation and with the dominating influence of the media in a world that is becoming increasingly abstract and from which any direct perception is rapidly disappearing.

Our questions to curators, artists, university tutors and gallery owners throughout Switzerland brought many insights. At our request some two hundred and fifty artists submitted their portfolios and after a lengthy process of elimination we eventually selected twenty-one artistic positions which together reflect the richness and intensity of the submissions as a whole. Each and every visual statement stands alone. Together, however, they delineate certain thematic and methodological fields, which we have presented under three groupings: Exploring the World, Constructing the World and World-Self-Worlds. The guiding principle here is an exacting yet enjoyable confluence of reality and fiction: fantastic realities and real fantasies. Sometimes staged photography can be more realistic (more tangibly representative of the world) than documentary photography. That is what makes it such an appealing and candid mirror of our times. We live in a world of ambiguity; floating and drifting. These photographs do the same.

An exhibition of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, curated by Urs Stahel and Thomas Seelig.

Main sponsor of the exhibition: Swiss Re

Publication: "Reale Fantasien - Neue Fotografie aus der Schweiz / Real Fantasies - New Photography from Switzerland", ed. Urs Stahel / Thomas Seelig, Format 23x30 cm. Approx. 150 colour illustrations. Essay by Urs Stahel, German / English. Published by Christoph Merian Verlag. Exhibition price Fr. 49.-

Artists' discussions: on Sunday, 19 March and 2 April at 11.30 a.m., in the exhibition "Real Fantasies", the artists will hold a discussion against the background of their works.

You will find more details under www.fotomuseum.ch News Events