Image: Swiss Foundation for Photography
Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur will open 'Roger Humbert – Fotografien für den geistigen Gebrauch' on 30 August 2025, presenting a survey of the Swiss photographer’s work through 15 February 2026. Humbert (1929–2022) is described by the institution as one of the most important representatives of “Concrete Photography” in Switzerland, and the exhibition traces his long engagement with light across more than seven decades.
According to the museum material, Humbert developed his investigations of light from analogue photograms to classical photography and, later, digital light compositions. The exhibition brings together that breadth of practice rather than isolating a single phase of his career. Fotostiftung Schweiz says the show offers an overview of a body of work that includes camera-less photography as well as series documenting the objective world.
The institution’s exhibition page places Humbert within a line of Swiss photographic pioneers. His guiding statement, “I photograph light,” is used to frame a practice concerned with the relationship between subject and object, materiality and consciousness, and, in the museum’s wording, physics and metaphysics. Much of the work classified as photographs for “geistigen Gebrauch” was produced in the nighttime solitude of the darkroom, where Humbert used stencils in non-repeatable arrangements to create unique photograms and luminograms.
Fotostiftung Schweiz also situates Humbert historically as a co-founder, alongside René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, of a form of Concrete Photography that emerged in the 1960s and remains a recognized term today. The exhibition draws on a significant part of Humbert’s archive, much of which has been in the Fotostiftung Schweiz since 2007. That allows the presentation to move between early analogue light experiments and later digital work by an artist who continued to explore light-making well into old age.
The exhibition is structured around contrasts as much as chronology. The museum says it sets Humbert’s late digital light recordings against his early analogue experiments in order to make visible his ambitions and the overlap between free artistic work and the practical demands of his applied career as a commercial image-maker. The page notes that Humbert ran a successful studio in Basel, a detail that helps explain the dual character of a practice that moved between art and professional commissions.
A publication with the same title is scheduled to appear with Vexer Verlag in partnership with Turm zur Katz in Konstanz. The museum also lists an exhibition leaflet and a poster designed by Müller+Hess in Basel and printed by JCM in Schlieren. The exhibition venue is Fotostiftung Schweiz, Grüzenstrasse 45, Winterthur, with the run confirmed as 30 August 2025 to 15 February 2026.
