ROGER HUMBERT
Swiss artist Roger Humbert (1929-2022) was a pioneer of concrete photography. His extensive photographic oeuvre, which he began producing in the 1950s, is characterized by its experimental nature and its focus on the form and structure of the photographic image itself.
Humbert's work is closely related to art movements such as vorticism, the Bauhaus tradition, and the philosophy of existence of Jean-Paul Sartre. He was one of the founders of the concrete photography movement and one of its main representatives in Switzerland. His minimalist light compositions, created in collaboration with photographers René Mächler, Jean Frédéric Schnyder, and Rolf Schroeter, were based solely on their own internal laws.
Humbert's work has been exhibited in many important exhibitions, including Nonrepresentational Photography in Basel in 1960 and the first exhibition entitled Concrete Photography in Bern in 1967. His oeuvre has been held at the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur since 2002 and is represented in numerous international museums, including the Peter C. Ruppert Collection in Würzburg and the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva.
Humbert worked exclusively in the darkroom until 1974, using only light sources, form elements such as stencils and punch cards, and the chemical process of development to create his images. His camera-less photograms, luminograms, and clichés verres do not depict the world as we know it but rather create a new reality at the moment of exposure on the photographic paper.
In 2005, Humbert began to explore digital photography, which he felt completed the circle of his more than 60 years of work from camera-less photography to concrete digital photography. The latent image was always at the center of his attention.
