Ernst Brunner

Ernst Brunner (born December 5, 1901 –June 1, 1979) was a Swiss documentary and ethnographic photographer.

Early life and career

Brunner completed a carpentry apprenticeship in his father's company in Mettmenstetten. From 1918 he went on a walking tour. From 1923 to 1925 he attended the Schreiner-Fachschule in Nuremberg and the class for interior design at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich. In 1929 he left the carpentry trade and moved to Lucerne. After having been influenced ideas of Bauhaus, Brunner worked as an interior designer at Theiler + Helber in Lucerne. During the Depression he lost his job.

Photographer

In 1936 he worked on an inventory of historical monuments in the context of a public employment program for the unemployed. He put to use his skills as a photographer which he had taught himself in the 1920s. Through a happy coincidence he showed his avocational photography to publisher Regina Verlag in Zurich and was soon photographing for the influential national magazine Schweizer Heim and Schweizer Familie from 1936 until the 1950s. His main subject matter was everyday life in traditional rural Switzerland, focusing particularly on agriculture and craft. Brunner experienced a rapidly changing rural Swiss life and he wanted to preserve this world and the inherited knowledge of farmers who worked hard without mechanical help, with few resources and close to Nature in glorious alpine regions.

He was quite systematic as a photographer using the camera to document his subjects as objectively as possible. He made photo sequences on the same subject, or to document a work or social process, as he wanted to capture the rural and rural world as accurately as possible. He photographed longer sequences of images to document workflows as accurately as possible, and put great emphasis on the involvement of the historical, geographic and social environment, for example, when he photographed craftsmanship. Typically he made between ten and twenty photos, and sometimes as many as one hundred separate images, like frames of an ethnographic film  (for example in his series on charcoal burning). These sequences show all the relevant details of a process, regardless of the visual impact of individual photos.He composed his photos with strong and simple forms. His compositions were often from above or below his subjects, which both added visual interest to him images, and provided additional descriptive information to his documentary series.

As an archivist he kept a careful filing system in which his images were gathered under keywords such as "work," "architecture," or "customs”, and within each of these the subjects were separated geographically.

Leading up to and during WW2 Das Schweizer Heim used Brunner’s imagery to serve a conservative and nationalist agenda, removing them from the sequences and contexts of his anthropological studies, often by cropping the images, to isolate imagery of the heroic, traditional and quintessentially Swiss, alpine farm worker.

International recognition

In 1952 Edward Steichen visited Switzerland to collect photographs for the show The Family of Man, and where he was introduced to photographers by Robert Frank. There he selected a photograph by Brunner, probably shown to him by Swiss editor Arnold Kubler from Du magazine in which it had been published in 1950 in an issue devoted to dance. The picture selected shows the "Alpfest im Unterengadin" (‘Feast on an alpine pasture in Lower Engadin’), a celebration called "Masilras," which took place place exactly one week after the dairy herds were moved to summer pastures up on the alps. The exhibition opened at the  Museum of Modern Art , New York , January 24–May 8, 1955, from where it then toured the world to be seen by 9 million visitors.

In 1954 Brunner was initiator and director of the "Vereinigung Luzerner Bauernhausforschung”, and their photographer for which he complete a final documentary work. The project, supported by the "Aktion Bauernhaus Forschung" was to document all farmhouses in a Swiss district, and took twenty years during which time he was not obliged to publish anything, and it was completed only two years before he died in 1979. The purposes of these photos are simply to document, as completely as possible and are still more methodical, and more objective, eschewing the unusual angles of view in the earlier series for a frontal and exact rendering of the traditional buildings.

He was also co-founder of the Swiss Agricultural Museum Burgrain in Alberswil.

Before his death in 1979, he bequeathed his archives to the society of Swiss anthropology, where they are still available in his original archival system.

Exhibitions

• Photography in Switzerland - Today. Gewerbemuseum, Basel 1949, group exhibition
• The Family of Man. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1955, group exhibition
• Side views. Switzerland 1848 to 1998. Forum of Swiss History, Schwyz 1998, group exhibition
• Photography in the Emmental. Idyll and reality. Bern Art Museum, Berne 2000

Publications

• 100 Bilder von einem Kohlemeier im Entlebuch, Eigenverlag, Luzern 1940
• Die Bauernhäuser im Kanton Luzern», Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, Basel 1977
• Peter Pfrunder, «Ernst Brunner. Photographien 1937-1962» (Monografie), Offizin, Zürich 1995.
• Ernst Brunner, PHOTOGRAPHIEN 1937-1962, OZV Offizin Zürich 1995
• Emil Brunner, BERGKINDER 1943-1944, Limmat Verlag Zürich 2004

Bibliography

• Bachmann, D. 1996. "Der geduldige Planet. Eine  Weltgeschichte," 255 Fotografien aus der Zeitschrift "du." Zurich: du Verlag.
• Brunner, E. 1977. Die Bauernhauser im Kanton Luzern.  Basel: Krebs.
• du. Schweitzer Monatsschrift 1941 till today. Zurich: Conzett Huber.
• Hamilton, P. 1997. "Representation The Social: France  and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography,"
• Hall, S. Representation: Cultural Representations  and Signifying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publishers, 76-150.
• Pfrunder, P. 1995. Ernst Brunner. Photographien 1937-  1962. Offizin: Zurich.
• Das Schweizer Heim 1913-1971, Illustrated magazine, Zurich: Regina.
• Steichen, E., ed., 1955. The Family of Man. New York:  The Museum of Modern Art.
• Weiss, R. 1946, 1984. Volkskunde der Schweiz.
• Grundriss. Eugen Rentsch Schwabisch Hall: Zurich.
• 1941. Das Alpewesen Graubündens. Zürich: Erlebach.

External  Links

• Gregor Egloff: Brunner, Ernst. In: Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
• Publications by and about Ernst Brunner (1901-1979) in the catalog Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• Literature by and about Ernst Brunner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Picture examples by Ernst Brunner

References

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