Roger Humbert – Fotografien für den geistigen Gebrauch

The work of Roger Humbert (1929-2022) occupies a pioneering position in Swiss photography. His guiding principle, “I photograph the light”, clearly expresses Humbert’s artistic exploration of the interplay between subject and object, materiality and consciousness, and thus between the physical and the metaphysical. The majority of Humbert’s photographs for “spiritual use” were produced by him at night and all alone in his dark room. He created unique photograms and luminograms playing with templates that were irreproducible, and which served the artist as pre-digital image generators. Together with René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, he established “concrete photography” in the 1960s, a concept that still remains in place today.

The publication Roger Humbert – Fotografien für den geistigen Gebrauch presents an overview of Humbert’s work, a large part of which has been with the Fotostiftung Schweiz since 2007. It shows not only cameraless photography, but also series in which he documents the objective world. At 90 years of age, Humbert still enthusiastically explored the world of digitally recording light. A comparison of this late body of work with his early analogue light experiments renders Humbert’s visible and highlights the interrelationship between free artistic creation and the daily work of an applied photo author who runs one of Basel’s most successful studios.

The publication is being released in connection with the exhibition of the same name in the Turm Zur Katz in Constance (7.2.–1.6.2025) and in the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur (21.6.–12.10.2025).