Karlheinz Weinberger: Swiss Rebels - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3958293298 ISBN 13: 9783958293298

Publisher: Steidl, 2017

Synopsis

Karlheinz Weinberger’s day job may have been relatively uneventful―working in a Siemen’s warehouse―but the photos he took in his spare time are anything but conformist.

Weinberger’s passion, and the focus of this book, is the rebel youth of 1950s and ’60s Switzerland, who channeled American rock-’n’-roll culture and made it their own with their rolled-up jeans and denim jackets, bouffant hairdos, striped T-shirts and customized belts boasting images of Elvis and James Dean. Weinberger’s lusty, free-spirited and self-confident portraits posit the defiant attitude of youth as a response to the conservative postwar era. Swiss Rebels also includes homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes, many of whom occupy positions outside of social norms. This publication is the first to present an overview of Weinberger’s provocative oeuvre.

Born in 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a Swiss photographer whose work predominantly explored outsider cultures. Between 1943 and 1967 Weinberger published photos of male workers, sportsmen and bikers in the gay magazine Der Kreis under the pseudonym of Jim, taken from Hanns Eisler’s song “The Ballad of Jim.” In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s he concentrated on Swiss rock-’n’-roll youth, whom he photographed with both tenderness and a hint of irony. Weinberger placed little emphasis on exhibiting his work; his first comprehensive show took place only in 2000, six years before his death.

About this title

Review

...a Treasure Trove for Rebellious Denim Heads. (Rebecca Bengal Vogue)

...gives homage to a Helvetian generation in search of their identity... A work that is rightly sexy, shocking and totally iconic: it is more than just a series of Elvis fans in an absolute rock & roll crisis behind these images there is a contemplation of the difference. (Jonas Cuenin L'Oeil de la Photographie)

The outcasts and rogues of postwar society...These young men and women idolized the brooding sexuality of American rebels like Elvis Presley and James Dean... (Alex Arbuckle Mashable)

The outcasts and rogues of postwar society... These young men and women idolized the brooding sexuality of American rebels like Elvis Presley and James Dean.. (Alex Q. Arbuckle Mashable)

Now Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, a French critic, has written “Pissing Figures, 1280–2014,” a genealogy of the pisseurs and pisseuses who haunt our canvases, fountains, and frescoes. The book, in a rangy, fluent translation from Jeff Nagy, is a record of what Lebensztejn calls our “diuretic fantasies”―of the lore and lust surrounding urine, sacred and profane. (Dan Piepenbring The New Yorker)

The joy of a Weinberger photograph is in the fact that everyone is doing the most. Subtle is for someone else: here more is more. Big hair, big belt buckles, motorcycle clubs―everyone going their hardest to evoke American realness. (Miss Rosen Crave)

Edition details

• Publisher: Steidl
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 3958293298
• ISBN 13: 9783958293298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239
• Editor: Woerdehoff Esther, Schedler Patrik