The ninety-one-year-old Swiss avant-gardist changed the way women were viewed, revolutionizing the design of women’s magazines such as Elle. The Swiss Foundation for Photography is making room for her with more than 700 pictures taken in the 1960s and 70s.

“Fashion photography is meant to be printed. There is always a commission behind it, it is applied art. A fashion photo for Vogue magazine has a different attitude than a photo for Elle. An image for a fashion designer is different from an image for advertising. If a photographer does not notice this difference, he or she is making a mistake. It is specific social information. It is with this artistic approach that the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Zurich is devoting an exhibition to this photographer, graphic designer, painter and director, who has shaken up the shackles of the fashion sphere by renewing the modalities of the women’s press. After studying Applied Arts and Fine Arts, influenced by the methods of the Bauhaus, Peter Knapp made a decisive career in Paris. Freshly arrived in the capital in 1951 at the age of 20, he became artistic director two years later for Galeries Lafayette, before joining Elle magazine, managed by the progressive and feminist Hélène Lazareff, from 1959 to 1966, then from 1974 to 1977. Gone were the haute couture models, replaced by models of the average woman who were free, mobile and emotional. Ready-to-wear became more widespread and the wardrobe of active post-war women was transformed.

Trend setter

Peter Knapp quickly abandoned illustrative fashion drawings and the strict layout grid. He experimented with innovative techniques, which gradually revolutionised the editorial line. His field of action focuses on the combination of image and writing, controlling every step of the railway between photography, typography, graphic design, posters and brochures. His pictures play with double pages, highlight the emancipation of women and stage the collections of fashion designers, giving an important place to the work of the “image makers”. His particular touch is also to extract still images from a 16 mm camera where “blurred, instantaneous framing and involuntary movements” play with this “aerial dynamic”. One thing leading to another, his work led him to collaborate with Courrèges and Ungaro. And later, with Vogue, Stern and Sunday Times. But Peter Knapp has also made documentaries for the TV programme Dim, Dam, Dom, films on the history of photography and film portraits of graphic designers. If fashion represents a short chapter in the career of this unclassifiable artist, it remains engraved in the collective memory as change and renewal.

Nathalie Dassa

Exhibition “Peter Knapp – My time
The Swiss Foundation for Photography
Until 12 February 2023

https://www.fotostiftung.ch/en/exhibitions/current/peter-knapp-mon-temps/