Biography: René Groebli, born 1927 in Zurich, Switzerland

René Groebli, born on October 9, 1927, in Zurich, Switzerland, is a Swiss photographer known for his distinctive, experimental and often avant-garde images that have helped shape photographic vision and design on an international level. Groebli’s oeuvre cannot be reduced to a single theme, genre, or style. Calling it multifaceted would be the least; Time and again, he has ventured forward, has attempted the previously unseen and, in doing so, has repeatedly broken new ground without settling there permanently. As a photographic author, he has continually reinvented himself, setting standards both as an artist and as an imaginative service provider.

 

Although he was initially drawn to film, Groebli began an apprenticeship as a photographer with Theo Vonow in Zürich and then went on to study photography under Hans Finsler at the Zurich School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) in 1945-46. Finsler’s school of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) with its cool realism and emphasis on the static did not conform with Groebli’s fascination for movement and his urge to capture things from his very own, subjective perspective, though. After only one semester of studies, he therefore went back to film and, between 1946 and 1948, underwent training as a documentary cameraman at Central Film and Gloria Film in Zurich, acquiring a diploma – only to realise that personal perspective and expression were not sought after there, either.

In the mid-fifties, Groebli left photojournalism and opened his own studio for advertising and industrial photography, specializing in colour photography. Groebli did not see the fact that many of the great masters of photography at the time, such as Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, resolutely rejected “cheap, amateurish” color photography as a reason to do the same; on the contrary, he saw it as an opportunity for himself. He threw himself into exploring the new possibilities that color photography offered in terms of creative expression. He perfected the dye-transfer process and experimented with other techniques such as crossfading and colour manipulation, applying those newly found possibilities and ideas into his commercial work and, conversely, applying his primarily technical insights from advertising or industrial photography back into his art. Groebli's color photography leaves factual representation far behind, even in the context of industry and advertising, and consistently focuses on blurring, movement, energy and color atmosphere, long before photoshop. Using carefully chosen colours and alienation processes, Groebli achieved surprising and convincing results, also in the field of portrait photography. In his search for a way out of “the stagnation of portrait photography”, he attempted to translate personality into a compelling image: He achieved this particularly convincingly with his portrait of the painter Aja Iskander Schmidlin, taken in the studio in 1970. Here, he tried to show the painter "as he might have painted himself" - in other words, "‘light painting" in the truest sense.