At the beginning of the 1990s, Jean-Pascal Imsand (1960-1994) was somewhat the enfant terrible of photography in Switzerland. Young, talented and individualistic, he made himself a reputation in the most varied photographic genres, in particular urban landscapes and portraits.
After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Basel, Jean-Pascal Imsand completed a five-year apprenticeship in lithography printing at Pietro Sarto's Saint-Prex print shop. There he developed a passion for photolithography and was able to experiment with the process at leisure. He collaborated in the production of the gravure portfolios of Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. When he went into photography in 1985, he therefore had the advantage of a solid training in all elements of photography. This training ensured he was able to make the most of a technique with which he was already very familiar. |
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He took a very personal approach to his first commissions, adopting a style that was dark and verging on the fantastic. The city, youth and nightlife were his favourite themes. His wife Sabrina occupied a key place in his work and was the subject of endless portraits. He also made photomontages, a genre in which he was able to give free reign to his imagination, and collaborated with a number of newspapers and magazines (Hebdo, Das Magazin, du, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Nouveau Quotidien, Tages Anzeiger, etc). In 1987, he began working for the World Economic Forum in Davos, providing photographic cover of the event. He was not unhappy working as a photo reporter. Proof of this is the fact that he became a member of the Paris agency, Vu, in 1990, and the Zurich agency, Lookat, in 1991. |
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In 1988, he settled in Zurich, where he made photo reports on very different subjects in his district of the city, Kreis V — the Limmatstrasse, the seasonal railway workers, the Brocki-Land (a flea market not far from his home), the handicapped workers from the Werkstube, the municipal soup kitchens, the drug scene in Letten, etc.. While for him Zurich was a subject that lent itself more to reporting, Lausanne was a city whose nocturnal scene he liked to portray in its most disturbing and strangest aspects.
Fabio Pusterla writes of him "The city, and its living breath; but it is a city that has no name. Although Imsand’s pictures are mainly taken in Lausanne and Zürich, the metropolitan portrait that he produces is timeless and universal: it is not the typical or characteristic aspects of a place that attracts the eye of the photographer, but the urban typology." |
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A rebellious, sensitive, tormented and romantic individual, like numerous young artists of other eras, Jean-Pascal Imsand is one of the most brilliant and most unique representatives of Swiss photography at the end of the 20th century.
The Jean-Pascal Imsand exhibition brings together the key works of his brief but intense period of creativity for the first time, and lifts the veil on his world of personal and poetic images, his life as a photographer between dreams and reality, between hard copy and imaginary. |
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