Photographs are accompanied by letters, drawings and excerpts from the photographer's journals in this monograph. Trained as a graphic artist and photographer, Bischof was associated with the Swiss magazine Du in the 1940s and travelled on assignment throughout war-devastated Europe.
In 1916, with the Great War reducing northern Europe to a treeless, shattered void, a boy was born to the prosperous director of a pharmaceutical firm in Zurich. He was named Werner. It was not an auspicious time to be born and, indeed, his mother died soon after. As a child, young Werner sought order in his life by dissecting snails and photographing, in the limpid light of his creation, the elegant whorls revealed. He did not become the physical training instructor his father wanted him to be. He did not become the painter he had once wanted to be in Paris in 1939, on the brink of another devastating conflict. He became Werner Bischof, the man, and a photographer of incalculable artistry who found in both order and the chaos he confronted and experienced a sublime beauty, a humanity that was singularly his own. His photographs of a post-war Europe in poverty and despair expressed infinite hope for the human condtion, yet he was only 29. Less than 10 years later he was dead, leaving behind among his last photographs that of a Peruvian child playing his flute on the edge of a ravine. It is now an iconic photograph with a fatal allure. Bischof himself died when his jeep plunged over a ravine in the Andes on a quest for the faces, the lives, of harmony there. Fifty years later his son Marco has gathered together 70 previously unpublished photographs by Werner Bischof. They powerfully reiterate the man his father was, the nature of his humanity and his search for a benign and beautiful cognisance of the brief and terrifying world he lived in.
Collector's Edition: packaged in a presentation case with a numbered contact sheet featuring Werner Bischof's Courtyard of the Meiji Temple, 1951. Each contact sheet is embossed with 'Magnum Photo Collections' on the white border, and hand-stamped with the photographer's copyright on the verso. Produced to the exacting demands of Magnum's own print room and with the approval of the individual photographers or estates involved, these contact sheets provide an exceptional insight into the creation of truly great photographs. This special and important photography book presents, for the first time, the very best contact sheets created by Magnum photographers. Contact sheets tell the truth behind a photograph. They unveil its process, and provide its back story. Was it the outcome of what a photographer had in mind from the outset? Did it emerge from a diligently worked sequence, or was the right shot down to pure serendipity a matter of being in the right place at the right time? This landmark publication provides the reader with a depth of understanding and a critical analysis of the story behind a photograph, the process of editing it, and the places and ways in which the selected photographs were used. For anyone with a deep appreciation of photography and a desire to understand what goes into creating iconic work, Magnum Contact Sheets will be regarded as the definitive volume. With 435 illustrations in total, 230 in colour, including over 3,600 frames on 139 contact sheets.
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