Foto Povera

Giorgio Wolfensberger was born in 1945 in Zürich, grew up in Winterthur and died in 2016 in Umbria, which he’d made his adoptive geographical and political home. He was not only an industrial photographer, filmmaker, slide-show specialist, expert on and writer for the Swiss modern dancer and dance teacher Suzanne Perrottet, sleuth extraordinaire for archival photographs; he was also a collector and photographer equipped with a seventh sense for the things of this world. He seems to have been a magnet for the peculiarities of everyday life, departures from the norm, the play of objects, the humorous and the grotesque, as though his eyes, nose and fingers were probes immersed in physical reality. Whether on assignment for an exhibition project or a book, roaming freely on the prowl in the city or driving around the countryside, he always discovered something unusual in the commonplace, something of his own in the general, something rich in the poor, something strange in the norm. This book brings together his artistic freelance photography for the first time, to form a cabinet of curiosities, a variegated cabaret of things. Beginning with the black-and-white documentary photography of his first years in Italy, he gradually developed a rich, humorous, colorful photo povera, an enchanting, pensive dance of “poor” plain things. —Urs Stahel

Giorgio Wolfensberger was born in 1945 in Zürich, grew up in Winterthur and died in 2016 in Umbria, which he’d made his adoptive geographical and political home. He was not only an industrial photographer, filmmaker, slide-show specialist, expert on and writer for the Swiss modern dancer and dance teacher Suzanne Perrottet, sleuth extraordinaire for archival photographs; he was also a collector and photographer equipped with a seventh sense for the things of this world. He seems to have been a magnet for the peculiarities of everyday life, departures from the norm, the play of objects, the humorous and the grotesque, as though his eyes, nose and fingers were probes immersed in physical reality. Whether on assignment for an exhibition project or a book, roaming freely on the prowl in the city or driving around the countryside, he always discovered something unusual in the commonplace, something of his own in the general, something rich in the poor, something strange in the norm. This book brings together his artistic freelance photography for the first time, to form a cabinet of curiosities, a variegated cabaret of things. Beginning with the black-and-white documentary photography of his first years in Italy, he gradually developed a rich, humorous, colorful photo povera, an enchanting, pensive dance of “poor” plain things. —Urs Stahel