"Jakob Tuggener was simultaneously a photographer, a film-maker and a painter, but he saw himself above all as an artist. Influenced by the German Expressionist films of the 1920s, he developed a poetic-artistic style that would become an inspiration for young photographers after the Second World War.” (Martin Gasser).
Jakob Tuggener’s key photographic motifs were conditions in the factory, simple life in the countryside and the glamourous balls in grand hotels. At the same time Tuggener was fascinated by railroads, ports, ships, car races and air shows. Through photography he sought to capture all facets of modern life in a world between dark factories and glittering ballrooms. From the mid-1930s, he made book maquettes of all these subjects, each one crafted meticulously by hand and featuring up to 150 original photographs. None of these were published during his lifetime except Fabrik in 1943, his seminal Bildepos der Technik which has formed the basis of his international reputation.
Born in Zurich in 1904, Jakob Tuggener took his first photographs in 1926 teaching himself the medium. After completing an apprenticeship as a technical draftsman at Maag Zahnräder AG in Zurich, he studied at the Reimann School in Berlin from 1930 to 1931. At that time, the Reimann School was one of most important private arts and crafts school in Germany, focusing on graphics, typography, drawing, shop window design, and film.
Upon returning to Switzerland, Tuggener worked as an industrial photographer for the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, with his work being regularly published in the company’s in-house magazine Der Gleichrichter. In 1932 he set up his own business and in 1934 he bought a Leica camera and photographed a Grand Ball in Zurich for the first time. In the following year he produced his first commissioned book, MFO, which was a portrait of the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon. Soon afterwards, Tuggener was obsessed with and enchanted by these extravagant society events, with their “alabaster light” illuminating a “fairy tale of women and flowing silk”, and he returned to photograph them for two decades, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. He captured soirées at hotels such as the Palace and the Carlton in St. Moritz, the Baur au Lac and the Dolder in Zurich, as well as at the Vienna Opera Ball. However, his lens also captured the “invisible labour” of musicians, waiters, cooks, valets and butlers, as they moved silently through the festive and elegant society.
“Above all, the contrast between the brilliantly lit ballroom and the dark factory hall influenced the perception of his artistic oeuvre. Tuggener also positioned himself between these two extremes when he stated: ‘Silk and machines, that’s Tuggener’. In reality, he loved both: the wasteful luxury and the dirty work, the enchanting women and the sweaty labourers. For him, they were both of equal value and he resisted being categorized as a social critic who pitted one world against the other. On the contrary, these contrasts belonged to his conception of life and he relished experiencing the extremes – and the shades of tones in between – to the most intense degree.” (Martin Gasser)
For Tuggener, photography was never just a single image; it was always a carefully arranged and clear sequence of images that told a story from beginning to end, like in his book Fabrik: Ein Bildepos der Technik, (1943), which is considered an important milestone in the history of the photographic book, comparable with Brassaï’s Paris de nuit (1933) and Bill Brandt’s The English at Home (1936). Though not a commercial success, this photographic essay on the relationship between man and industry represented an avant-garde breakthrough in Swiss photography through its filmic sequencing and absence of text. Fabrik also launched Tuggener’s reputation as an exceptional photographic artist, leading to many notable projects.
In 1949, Walter Laubli, the editor of Camera magazine, published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener's photographs. Alongside Tuggener’s work, Camera introduced 25-year-old Robert Frank, who had just returned to Switzerland after spending two years abroad. The magazine featured some of Frank's early photographs of New York, and promoted the two photographers as representatives of Switzerland's 'new photography'. Jakob Tuggener was a role model for Robert Frank. According to Guido Magnaguagno, Tuggener was the “one Frank really did love, from among all Swiss photographers”, and Tuggener’s publication Fabrik, was a model for Frank’s Les Américans, published by Delpire in Paris in 1958.
In 1951, Jakob Tuggener was invited by Otto Steinert to participate in the legendary exhibition "subjektive fotografie", and in 1953, Tuggener received international recognition when he was included in the Postwar European Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Then, in 1955, two of his photographs were selected by Edward Steichen for the world-touring MoMA exhibition The Family of Man.Despite the exhibition touring 44 European and American cities and being visited by nine million people, and despite being admired and honoured by photographers and film directors in his native Switzerland, Tuggener remained largely unknown during his lifetime.
Today Tuggener’s work is held in the collections of several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (where his photograph “woman running upstairs” was featured in the 1958 exhibition Photographs from the Museum Collection), the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Fotostiftung Schweiz, as well as the Albertina in Vienna, to name a few.
In 2018, Steidl Publishers dedicated an extensive publication project to the body of work of Jakob Tuggener; Books and Films comprises facsimiles of twelve of his original maquettes, dating from 1936 to 1982, as well as a selection of his 16mm films on DVD. Both these silent black-and-white films and his photobooks contain no text, just as he intended. This comprehensive publication, limited to 1’000 boxed sets, is the first opportunity for a broad audience to appreciate the vast scope of Tuggener’s work.