Fotomuseum Winterthur focuses on history and current trends of photography

Fotomuseum Winterthur, founded in 1993, is solely dedicated to photography as an emerging art form and mode of documentation, as well as a pointed representation of reality.

Fotomuseum Winterthur has been managing a Center of Photography together with Fotostiftung Schweiz since 2003, with a library, a lounge, a shop, and seminar rooms,. On its new expanded premises, Fotomuseum Winterthur hosts changing shows of art works from its rich collection of contemporary photography, apart from the changing exhibitions.

It proudly positions itself as ‘on the one hand an art gallery’ for the art form especially by contemporary artists with periodic exhibitions. One such show hosted by it, namely ‘150 Years of Photography in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh’ looks at the contemporary work from a historical perspective. ‘Where Three Dreams Cross’ was recently organized by London’s Whitechapel Gallery in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur.

The exhibit focuses on four broad thematic threads, namely: The Performance, The Family, The Portrait, The Body Politic and The Public Space. Thus it looks to capture the theatrical as well as the intimate aspects of human life, along with the hierarchies, which structure society and also the chaos, the tangle of colors, traffic, people and cinematic images lingering on the South-Asian continent landscape.

Interestingly, the Fotomuseum Winterthur also serves as a traditional museum especially for works done by known 19th and 20th century masters (through exhibitis by Karl Blossfeldt, Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Lisette Model, Charles Sheeler, Edward Weston, August Sander, and Weegee among others).

It is a hub of cultural-historical as well as sociological museum of applied photography in the varied fields of architecture, industry, fashion, etc. (with interesting exhibits on industrial photography, police photography, medical photography, dam-construction photography, etc.). These specific orientations form the very basis of the exhibition program and accompanying events and publications of the museum.