April 2020
I began my studies in photography at ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne) twenty years ago. Memories of this foundational and fruitful period remain very vivid, and the intensity of the experience has remained intact, causing a temporal distortion that draws the period of my studies nearer to the present. ECAL, founded shortly before the invention of photography in the 19th century, had long been a school of regional art. In the mid-1990s, it was suddenly revived by its new director, Pierre Keller, who rapidly propelled ECAL beyond the borders of the canton by granting it international status. Pierre Keller was a great traveler, a graphic designer turned artist and photographer, who hid neither his homosexuality nor his excesses, and who was known for his plain speaking. Politically incorrect and provocative, Pierre Keller brought new life to Lausanne through his friends, who transformed themselves—for either a day or for many long years—into instructors. Among them were Swiss and international celebrities like John Armleder, Walter Pfeiffer, Jean Tinguely, Keith Harring, Nan Goldin, Paolo Roversi, Stephen Shore, Phil Collins, and David Bowie. Neither Keller nor these artists had the academic credentials or the pedagogical skills normally required for teaching, but they all had the exceptional capacity to mesmerize their audience, to transcend lived experience, and to communicate.
While waiting for my studies to begin at ECAL, I left Ticino, where I was born, to stay in New York City. This was in August 2001, and a few days after my departure, the world was turned upside down with the attack on the Twin Towers. We were at the end of the 20th century, or rather at the beginning of the 21st. I had also been admitted to the art school in Zurich (currently ZHDK) that my father—an architect of Swiss-German origins and a graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ)—had deemed more serious. It was following a campus visit to ECAL and my encounter with its flamboyant director that my path had steered me clearly towards Lausanne. The entrance exam was tough, and following a stringent selection based on a portfolio review and subsequent interview, we joined very small classes that at the time only included between six and ten students. “Tailored” courses gave us the privilege of talking at length with guest faculty, who were all established working professionals. The photography program was part of the Department of Visual Communications, which federated other disciplines—graphic design and media and interaction design. The interdisciplinary courses issued under this curriculum allowed me to broaden my sensibilities and my understanding of visual culture, and to build a strong network based on bonds of friendship and collaboration with people of different artistic orientations. Throughout my years of study, the Düsseldorf Art Academy was the benchmark model with respect to photography, with its direct, serial style free of effects. At the time, under the direction of Pierre Fantys, photography at ECAL revived the Bechers’ genre of photography, placing it between offset and irony.
Having obtained my bachelor’s degree, I wanted to leave Switzerland and move to Paris, but Pierre Keller retained me by offering me an assistant position to create visuals for the school’s communications. Between 2005 and 2007, while pursuing my graduate degree, I began to teach photography to industrial design students. With my post-graduate degree under my belt, I finally left Switzerland in 2007 to open a studio in Paris.
After years of traveling and shooting, I returned to Lausanne in 2012 following my appointment as Head of the Bachelor‘s in Photography program at ECAL. Shortly after taking up this position, current Director Alexis Georgacopoulos lent me his support for the project ECAL Photography. By tracing the school’s finest photographic output over the last five years, I set out to show that an “ECAL style” did not exist. Style is useful; it's a trademark, a model, and a name. However, style is also formatting and remains susceptible to trends; it is volatile, fluctuating, and transient. ECAL Photography, a necessary look back, was a launching pad for me: my vision for photography at ECAL would be movement, and constant adaptation to the technological developments and cultural and aesthetic changes that are linked to them.
In commercials, films, magazines, and even personal exchanges, we produce and consume manipulated images that assimilate like a ““natural" and universal language. I was one of those students who straddled the analog and digital divide, but at ECAL, even today, these two techniques complement and answer one another. Analog photography, with its complex and time-consuming set up, allows the students to fix their gaze; their generation, born with digital technology, can take comfort in its materiality. Digital photography, with its malleability, questions paradigms that once seemed immutable, like principles of the single point of view, of perspective, and of time. This great gap between techniques means that our students make informed choices, and that their work does not reflect a “historical break”; a smartphone series should not be the result of insufficient knowledge or means, but the outcome of a conscious choice that can be justified if necessary.
In 2015, I was invited to take over the management of the Masters in Art Direction program, and to consider its separation into two tracks: Type Design and Photography. The new Masters in Photography program was born out of this endeavor in September 2016, the only program of its kind in Switzerland. In establishing the program’s educational course, the experience I had acquired while running the bachelor’s degree program was invaluable and allowed me to take some risks. The research project Augmented Photography, launched at the same time as the new Masters program, forged its identity by charting a unique academic course based on the materialization and dematerialization of the photographic image. In order to free photography of its two-dimensionality, we worked it so that it became object, sculpture, or spatial installation. The dematerialization of the image is the subject of training in several digital tools, including photogrammetry, CGI (Computer Generate Imagery), VR (Virtual Reality), and AR (Augmented Reality). With photogrammetry, it is possible today to dematerialize real three-dimensional objects and to import them into digital space. This transfer is achieved with computer software that produces a collage of a large number of “conventional” photographs taken around the object. By using 3D software, each student is now capable of building his/her/their ideal virtual photography studio, which offers total control over all aspects of the image. With a smartphone or tablet camera, augmented reality suggests screen content that is superimposed and added to the real. Meanwhile, virtual reality stimulates many senses at once: sight, hearing, and more recently, touch. By wearing a headset with an integrated display, the viewer is plunged into 360-space, offering him/her/them an immersive experience. The new generation of students appropriates these tools and software with surprising ease, no doubt as a result of being accustomed to digital environments and virtual analogies borrowed from photography. Here, just as in “real life,” it is above all a question of point of view, light, and framing. Sensitivity to these fundamental factors in reality is advantageous for managing these parameters within virtual space. Since its inception in the 19th century, photography has been intimately linked to technology, and since the advent of digitization, this relationship has seen a dizzying evolution, one that we are duty-bound to follow and study in order to understand its creative potential; a potential that, beyond any technique, is at the origin of all artistic expression.
Twenty years ago, I was twenty. The cultural and social changes of these last two decades have been great, and the freedom that Pierre Keller exercised with his provocations, his mistakes, his bold actions, and his visionary projects would be more limited today. Over the past twenty years, with widespread digitization, we have entered a post-photography era. We are in the midst of a visual revolution, with major changes in manufacturing, circulation, and consumption. The image everywhere, but its language remains very little examined by the general public. Production systems, which seem amply available, are in fact more and more automated, and they are leading us towards a loss of control on many levels—technical, political, social, and creative. With our permanent connection to networks, we navigate within an illusion of freedom “offered” by private supranational companies that in fact make us more bland and uniform. The photographic image is at the heart of this system, and today, in its fluid state, it maintains a relationship to (shooting) time that is negligible, since cameras film constantly, everywhere, in 360°, and in three dimensions. It is through the experience of new users, of our students—these digital natives—for whom we conceive these educational systems—that we need to understand, manage, build, and create our future relationship with photographic images.
Walter Pfeiffer and Milo Keller. Image ECAL/Jean-Vincent Simonet
© ECAL, Younès Klouche
Augmented Photography Exhibition. Nicolas Toulotte's project