SALZBURG.- Karl Geiser (1898-1957), one of the most significant 20th-century Swiss sculptors, was also an obsessive photographer. The camera released him from the unfulfillable aspirations which almost crushed him in his sculpture work. He photographed when he wanted to capture the atmospheric, the fleeting experience, the play of light, the external or internal mood – on streets and squares, at markets and folk festivals; or in his atelier, in order to “appropriate” his models. His pictures showed an intensive, loving view of people, yet they also fit together to form a spontaneous, touching chronicle of his feelings.

The great artistic freedom, expressed in Karl Geiser’s photography, is probably attributable to Geiser seeing photography, not as his vocation, but as a leisure activity. For him it was the happy opposite pole to the burden of sculpture work – as was drawing, an activity he often practised in parallel: having photographed, beginning in 1919, almost exclusively in his atelier, from 1932 a Leica gave him the chance to photograph while out and about. Before he got this camera, it was Geiser’s drawing block which allowed him to capture the things he discovered on his excursions and wished to capture.

Geiser was not producing a documentary. He was rather, as he once wrote in a letter to Hermann Hesse, seeking beauty – “a certain impression of what seemed to me to be beautiful”. And what he meant was not the gleam of the surface, but rather the innocent and unconscious beauty of the youthful body, of children and of people on whom life has left its mark. Karl Geiser’s photography lives, not from its information, but from the emotions, not from the task well completed, but from the observer’s feeling of happiness. Yet his photography also searches for the pictures in the mind, arranging the world according to picture ideas – particularly for this reason, his work feels fresher and more radical than many of the photographic works of his time.

Karl Geiser died at the end of March 1957 in his Zurich atelier – the exact date is unknown. 50 years after Geiser’s death, David Streiff, who is also curating the Salzburg exhibition, has systematically processed and newly assessed Geiser’s photographic legacy on behalf of the Swiss photographic foundation. For the exhibition, many new prints were produced from previously overlooked negatives. A selection of the more than 400 cardboard sheets, on which Geiser arranged his pictures, thematically, serially or rhythmically, also provides an insight into a strikingly modern centre-piece of his photographic work.

The exhibition, primarily dedicated to his photography, is supplemented by a number of sculptures and a representative selection from Geiser’s drawing and graphic work.