Arnold Odermatt: Karambolage - Hardcover

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9783882438666: Arnold Odermatt: Karambolage

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3882438665 ISBN 13: 9783882438666

Publisher: Steidl, 2003

With thoroughness and a meticulous attention to detail, Arnold Odermatt photographed automobile accidents on the streets of the Swiss canton of Nidwalden between 1939 and 1993. For 40 years, the Swiss police office recorded the wrecked cars left in the wake of excessive speed, drunk driving, right-of-way errors, and plain foolishness, in poignant, sometimes funny, and always strange atmospheric photographs. Though Odermatt was not formally trained as a photographer, he made images that evidence a studied appreciation for romantic landscape scenes and a simultaneous attention to the clinical detail of an accident of police procedure. He created them as a personal corollary to the documentary photographs that typically accompany police and accident reports in his picturesque Alpine country. Art historically, they call to mind such diverse sources as Weegee's scene-of-the-crime pictures from the 1930s and 40s, and Andy Warhol's interest in the banal spectacle of disaster and accident in the 1960s. Wholly original and surprising, beautiful and haunting, Odermatt's pictures were only recently introduced to the art world--when Harald Szeeman exhibited them at the 49th Venice Biennale, they were virtually unknown.

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About the Author:

Arnold Odermatt, born in Oberdorf, Switzerland, in 1925, joined the police force in 1948 and retired in 1990 with the rank of first lieutenant, chief of traffic police and vice commandant of the Nidwalden Police Department. Harald Szeemann exhibited the Odermatt photography at the 49th biannual art festival in Venice. In 2002, James Rondeau showed them in a one-man exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Urs Odermatt, born in Stans in 1955, studied direction and screenwriting with Krzysztof Kieslowski and works as a film and theater director. Since 1993, he has been publishing his father's work.

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