ARNOLD ODERMATT
‘Arnold Odermatt’
La Chambre, Strasbourg
14.12.2012 - 03.03.2013
There once was a Swiss officer named Arnold Odermatt, whose photographic work, long neglected, was an international echo while the author was past the age of retirement. Born in 1925 in the canton of Nidwalden in a family of eleven children whose father was a forester, Arnold Odermatt had first served an apprenticeship with a baker. However, the allergy away from his original profession and entered, quite by chance, in the cantonal police, in which he spent the next forty years.
In ten years, Arnold Odermatt won a camera in favor of a competition, which led gradually to develop an autodidact, a photographic practice that can be described as passionate. He took his Rolleiflex dual purpose with him everywhere and photographing the people and landscapes of the region, and later, his wife and children.
This photographic hobby, however, was met with indifference by his entourage, when one day, in the early 1990s, his son, Urs Odermatt rediscovered it. Photographs of police knew then gradual success. Exhibited in 1998 at the police station at the Frankfurt Book Fair, its black and white damaged cars hung the eye of the famous curator Harald Szeemann, who took them at the Venice Biennale in 2001 . Therefore, the shots of the Swiss police were rewarded with international recognition.
This exhibition aims to return to the “legend Odermatt”, through a selection of shots mixing personal and professional lives of the Swiss police which invite us to discover the different facets of the photographic practice Odermatt, whose photographs full of humor also reveal a keen sense of framing and staging.