UNSEEN COLOUR

The Roschlaub Gallery invites you to discover the largely unknown color photography of Werner Bischof in dialogue with his iconic black and white images. Four years ago, Marco Bischof and Tania Kuhn stumbled upon boxes containing hundreds of glass plate negatives in the archive of the Werner Bischof Estate, thus unearthing a hidden treasure of previously unknown color photographs by Werner Bischof, one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.

The original negatives from the period between 1938 and 1954 – breathtaking images from Switzerland, post-war Europe, and the countries visited by Bischof – were subsequently painstakingly restored over several years. The resulting prints lend Werner Bischof's work an unknown dimension and reveal a little-known aspect of his oeuvre. 

Werner Bischof used three cameras: a Rolleiflex, a Leica, and a Devin Tri-Color, which he had experimented with in his studio during the war years before taking it with him on his travels through postwar Europe. The Devin Tri-Color required a tripod, but it enabled, for the first time, color "one-shot" images. This means that the image is simultaneously exposed onto three glass plates using mirrors. Each black-and-white negative is fitted with a red, green, or blue filter. The resulting photographs have incredible resolution and unmistakable color intensity.

Marco Bischof believes his father's love of color photography was linked to his early ambitions to become a painter: plans that were thwarted by the war. In a letter to his colleague and contemporary Robert Capa, he wrote: "In my heart I will always be a painter who sees the past in color, who is thrilled by the abundance and richness of human expression, and who feels the limitations of the camera with a touch of melancholy."

"Not only the complete body of work, but especially the colored work, is a muscular torso. We find a panorama of technical and aesthetic possibilities tested, from sparklingly garish to soft and watercolor-like, from playfully rococo to aggressively pop-art, depending on the possibilities of the motif and the material."