Kurt Wyss – Eyewitness

Curated by Katharina Dunst

From August 12, Kunstraum Riehen will be showing a journey through the last 50 years of contemporary history using selected photographs and reportages by Kurt Wyss. The art and artists that Wyss documented and portrayed photographically throughout his life are just one part of a life's work that traces people and their actions through the eye of the camera.

Kurt Wyss has been a photographer since 1956 and worked as a freelance photojournalist from 1958. From 1965 until the merger with the Basler Nachrichten in 1976, he headed the photo editorial department of the Nationalzeitung. He then became editor ad personam at the newly founded Basler Zeitung, a permanent position that also gave him a great deal of creative freedom.

Kurt Wyss' mostly black and white pictures are characterized by clear compositions full of narrative power. They are also able to convey ambivalent or controversial views of reality.

It would never occur to Kurt Wyss to describe his photographs as art; it goes without saying that they are and must be filled with knowledge and skill. As if to guarantee this professional ethos and a commitment to the profession, Wyss lets the Ph in Photography be Ph. It refers with respect to the time when light art was created, but also to his own career.

For Wyss, whose dream job was once ethnologist, art is a testing ground for the "condition humaine", as Annemarie Monteil once aptly put it. It is always the person behind his profession, behind his image or behind his circumstances that interests him. There is, for example, the youth in Basel in the post-war period, quietly awakening resistance, people in Biafra during the war and the famine around 1969, but also Art Basel, which was founded at the same time, and its visitors to this day.

Not like a hunter, invisibly waiting for the right moment, you have to imagine Kurt Wyss at work. He actively steps onto the stage, interacts with his protagonists, discusses and creates an atmosphere that makes images beyond the clichés possible.

Interest and curiosity about things are just as important as the image assignment. "You only see what you know" is one of the many pieces of wisdom that Kurt Wyss casually brings into the conversation, whereby you quickly realize that this is something experienced and not just quoted.