Werner Bischof

Portrait of a woman carrying a basket on her head. Photograph by Werner Bischof, 1950

Werner Bischof was born in April 1916 in Zurich. Following his aptitude for painting, he attended a drawing course at Schiers for a year. Dissatisfied, in 1934 he enrolled at the school of applied arts in Zurich where he attended the photography course taught by Hans Fisler. Specializing in still-life and graduating in 1936, he started a photography and graphics workshop for posters and magazines; two years later he was hired by the publishers Amstutz & Herdegg. On the occasion of the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition, he designed the layout of the graphic arts pavilion and collaborated in the creation of the fashion pavilion.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, after a short stay in Paris, he joined the Swiss army, also working as a war reporter. This experience allows him to evaluate the gap between studio photography, based on careful planning, and photoreportage, fast in execution and unpredictable in dynamics. He will choose the latter, for the human contact and the possibility of continuous comparison with the present, without however renouncing the technical perfection gained during his training.
In the meantime, he met Arnold Kubler, writer, theater man and editor-in-chief of the art and culture magazine “Du”, and with him, between 1941 and 1942, he established a lasting relationship of collaboration. At the same time, he frequented the artistic avant-garde environments of Zurich, joining the surrealist movement “Allianz”.
Starting in 1945, he collaborated with the main international newspapers for which he wrote some important reports in war-torn Europe, among these, one of the first concerns Italians interned in Switzerland. In 1946 he crossed Italy, staring on film at the devastation and malaise generated by years of hostility, in particular the Milanese protest over the separation of Trieste from Italy, the survivors of the Nazi death camps in Trentino Alto Adige, the kindergartens for orphaned children in Emilia Romagna, the ruins of the abbey of Montecassino. In Rimini he met his future wife Rossellina Mandel.
In 1948, he photographed the Saint Moritz Olympics for “Life” and the following year he became a member of Magnum. He continued to travel in Northern and Eastern Europe, and in the 1950s he returned to Italy, where he published some reports on “Epoca”. On that occasion, he also took about fifteen shots in Sardinia, documenting the harshness and backwardness of working conditions in the Cagliari countryside and in the Iglesiente.
After a short stay in the Indian province of Bihar and a year spent in Japan, the war brought him back to the front line, first in Korea and then in Indochina.
In 1953, he left for the United States. The following year, on behalf of Magnum, he returned to the south of the continent, Panama, Chile and Peru.
On 16 May 1954, at only thirty-eight years old, he lost his life in a car accident in the Andes Mountains.