Patrick Weidmann

Monograph

Patrick Weidmann’s work today consists mainly of photography and writing. Back in the early 1980s he associated photographs with objects, but over the past 20 years his work has come to be centered on representing them. While his early “combined photographs,” as they could be called, included objects of a fetishistic nature (such as chains, for instance), he later chose depicted objects to incarnate fetishism. He brings this dimension of the commodities that surround us to the fore in images showing a Jacuzzi, an airplane seat, an electronic circuit, a soft toy, a cross-section of a car, or some random techno-style setup, framing the image so as to accentuate its fragmentary nature, itself characteristic of photography. In addition, as Joerg Bader puts it, “his handling of light—worthy of a marketing handbook, with cascading reflections and a clear preference for reflective surfaces—is a significant tool in persuading us that we live in the realm of commodities, in a world that is so mercenary that it now fills the entire life of everyone on the planet …”

This book is the first to be dedicated to Weidmann’s photographic work. It includes newly commissioned essays by Joerg Bader, Nicolas Buri, Philippe Cuenat, Emmanuel Grandjean, and Gauthier Huber, and is published with the support of Mamco, Geneva.