Pictures among Friends

With works by Werner Bischof, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernst Haas, George Rodger, Ruth Orkin, David Seymour and Ernst Scheidegger

On 30 November 2013 Swiss photographer and graphic artist Ernst Scheidegger turns 90. As a photojournalist and artistic portrait photographer he has written a chapter in the history of photography and as a picture editor of Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung he shaped the layout of the weekend supplement. With a small exhibition the Museum Folkwang pays homage to this creator of images, presenting the photographer as a collector: At the beginning of the 1950s he was a member of the Magnum Photos agency and swapped photographs with famous colleagues and friends such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Werner Bischof.

Museum Folkwang was recently able to acquire this collection with the support of the Krupp-Jubiläums-Stiftung. While today these images are valuable vintage prints, at the time they served as a different currency, not that of the art market but as tokens of friendship amongst colleagues.

Consequently, Ernst Scheidegger’s collection is full of surprises; alongside icons of 20th century photographic history there are also less well-known and yet equally high-class images by these champions of their trade. Seen as a whole, complemented by a selection of Scheidegger’s images, the photography of the young Magnum agency appears like a humanistic view of a wounded world before and after World War II.