Scheidegger und Spiess AG

Swiss photographer Rene Burri (1933-2014) has been wherever history had been played out. A member of the famous Magnum Photos cooperative since 1955, he photographed in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, recording the Six-Days and Yom Kippur Wars, as well as the Vietnam War during the 1960s. His many travels took him to Japan and China, across Europe and the Americas to report sharply many of the 20th century's major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities helped him create portraits of celebrities such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragan; or artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely. His iconic picture of Che Guevara with cigar, shot in 1963, is one of the world's most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits ever. Burri had a close relationship with Lausanne's Musee de l' Elysee and in 1987 the museum staged a first exhibition of his work, entitled The Ruins of the Future, followed by his first major retrospective in 2004. The museum also hosts the Fondation Rene Burri, which the artist established in 2013 as a home for his estate. Published to coincide with a new exhibition at Musee de l'Elysee in spring 2020, Rene Burri: An Eye Explosion draws from this vast collection. It brings together for the first time Burri's entire body of work, photographic and non-photographic. Black-and-white and colour photographs feature alongside previously unpublished archival documents as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolours, and other multiple objects he collected. It offers a new, multi-faceted and uniquely intimate view of one of the world's greatest photo reporters.

While completing the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian scholar Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. Departing from the ways in which Zumthor's pavilions frame the barely visible traces of the industrial exploitation of zinc in the 1890s, the conversation took unexpected turns. In meandering, impressionistic style and drawing on Zumthor's favourite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, and T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time and temporalities reverberate across the famous architect's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his continuous attempts of emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of Los Angeles' LACMA on a grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed new book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, illustrated with photographs by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Helene Binet.

In summer 2017, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor curated the exhibition Dear to Me at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, marking the 20th anniversary of one of his most famous designs. Part of the program were conversations with philosophers, curators, historians, composers, writers, photographers, collectors, and craftsmen that Zumthor had invited to contribute to the exhibition. His dialogues with them offer insights into the thoughts and practice of fascinating personalities. Together with his counterparts, he explores artistic preferences and practices, reasonings, as well as practical knowledge from artisanal experience. Always charming and affectionate, he follows-up persistently, and takes his guests with gentle determination on mutual intellectual strolls. The equally serious and serene conversations with Anita Albus, Aleida Assmann, Marcel Beyer, Helene Binet, Hannes Boehringer, Renate Breuss, Claudia Comte, Bice Curiger, Esther Kinsky, Ralf Konersmann, Walter Lietha, Olga Neuwirth, Rebecca Saunders, Karl Schloegel, Martin Seel, Ruedi Walli, and Wim Wenders are collected in 17 booklets held together in an exquisitely manufactured box. An 18th complementary booklet documents the Dear to Me exhibition in Bregenz through concise texts, images, drawings and plans.